This is a surprisingly negative take, you should look a little further. Microsoft Research has done an incredible amount of high quality research. I've mostly r

This is a surprisingly negative take, you should look a little further. Microsoft Research has done an incredible amount of high quality research. I've mostly read papers from them on programming languages, they have or did employ leading researchers behind C#, F#, Typescript (of course), as well as Haskell (Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow spent a long time there), F*, and Lean (built by Leonardo de Moura while at MSR). MSR's scope has been much broader than just languages, of course. You could look at their blog: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/ Or their list of publications: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/ Here's a (no longer updated, apparently) list of awards given to researchers at Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/awards-archive/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/awards-archive/ I've heard in interviews that MSR's culture is not what it used to be (like Bell Labs, maybe), but over time they've funded a ton of highly influential research.