Is Microsoft a Product company in your eyes? MSR has existed for a pretty long time and they seem to do a mix of self-directed research, publishing papers, etc,

Is Microsoft a Product company in your eyes? MSR has existed for a pretty long time and they seem to do a mix of self-directed research, publishing papers, etc, and talking to the other teams about the problems they have (eg excel getting FP or programming-by-example features had some MSR involvement. I don’t know how involved MSR were in stuff like some of the novel techniques used in bing or the RDMA-over-Ethernet things Microsoft tried to get to work in their datacentres (don’t recall if private or azure) – those things surely do count somewhat as research even if not MSR).