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Microsoft spends more than 9 billion on research
- david927 17y agoDon't be fooled, that's just tax code for "development work". What they have in real R&D is a black hole.
- bediger 17y agoI talked with the University of Colorado Comp Sci dept head a few years ago. He happened to mention losing Benjamin Zorn to Microsoft Research, and that it was a shame as MSR is a research "roach hotel": researchers go in, and nothing comes out.
- marshallp 17y agoSo it spends more than the NSF. Either that US government spends too little or Microsoft is full of BS.
- rbanffy 17y agoIn other news, Apple reports record sales :-P OK, OK... I know Microsoft really does some impressive research (as opposed to copying Apple products), but I couldn't resist. On my defense, I was there in the low 80's when Microsoft announced Windows and it grew increasingly Lisa-like on every press-release.
- ryandvm 17y agoI am perpetually surprised at the lack of innovation that Microsoft has. Like Google and Amazon, Microsoft is overrun with smart engineers, but somehow they have mysteriously manage to avoid introducing any products with any creative features in the last 10 years. Microsoft: Give your engineers some 20% time so they can start churning out products in "Microsoft Labs".
- wglb 17y agoI have a friend who works for Microsoft and we were discussing this a week or so ago. The difficulty is for new product ideas to be introduced into a successful, large company with a large installed base is that the product heads are understandably reluctant to let an internal new product come in and chew on their existing market base. New products have risk, old ones don't. Evidence suggests that there is internal innovation in research (GHC anyone?) but new products cannot be allowed to erode current cash flows.
- allenp 17y agoWhat about the new Courier / digital journal and what about the surface and project Natal? http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digital-journal-exclusive-pictures-and-de/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natal I know it is hard to compare to things like street-view, android, book search, etc, but it isn't just office and winxp anymore.
- throw_away 17y agohave any of those actually launched yet?
- emrah 17y agoMaybe it's not so much that they lack innovation, but perhaps that the decision makers at higher altitudes of the org chart are too risk averse, impatient, critical etc, so they ax projects before they get a chance to sprout wings and fly.