Microsoft Research was never a product development arm, it was a research arm. In that area they've succeeded magnificently -- a huge amount of seminal OS paper

Microsoft Research was never a product development arm, it was a research arm. In that area they've succeeded magnificently -- a huge amount of seminal OS papers (back when I was doing systems research) came out of MSR. In contrast, the Google papers always were (and I think mostly still are) complete crap. I say this as an exiting Google intern who's trying to work for them full-time.