12 ms·

Meet Microsoft, the world's best kept R&D secret

180 points by matan_a 14y ago

chayesfss 14y ago
They should throw some money at making adfs a better product
asimjalis 14y ago
Microsoft’s 9B R&D budget is mostly an accounting convenience. They include all product development in R&D.
- sek 14y ago
  Also the video at the end is just a marketing video from the Office department. At least it's not just a marketing vehicle like IBM Research and they build real products like Kinect. But that was also a bought company afaik and didn't come out of MS R&D.
- RyJones 14y ago
  Have you read a p&l from msft?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bediger4000 14y ago
I'll grant you that my personal anecdote is a few years old, but... Maybe 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to the Dean of the University of Colorado Comp Sci department. I could only remember Benjamin Zorn as a faculty member, so I dropped the name. By then, Zorn had gotten hired away to Microsoft R&D. The Dean of the Comp Sci department made a number of references to Microsoft R&D as a "research roach hotel" - researcher's go in, but no papers ever come out. If Microsoft R&D is a secret, then it's Microsoft's own problem, I assume.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pmrondon 14y ago
  At least in the area of programming languages this could not be further from the truth - papers from MSR are a significant portion of every year's POPL and PLDI proceedings.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Not to mention siggraph and...sosp/osdi. Ad publishing isn't a panacea, there are many ways we should be communicating, if anything we publish too many papers as researchers.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Here you will find 10,000 publications from Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=publications http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pu... That appears to be about four orders of magnitude more research than that used to fact check your story.
  - marshray 14y ago
    I look forward to reading http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=179572 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1795... this one about Halo combat skill development: Using these ratings from 7 months of games from over 3 million players, we look at how play intensity, breaks in play, skill change over time, and other titles affect skill.
- munchbunny 14y ago
  It'd be pretty difficult to recruit professors and researchers (whose professional careers depend on publishing papers) to do research for several years in a place where they can't publish. MSR encourages publishing almost to a fault. They even have a portion of their legal department specifically trained to support MSR's researchers so that the "corporate" tendencies from the rest of Microsoft don't bleed into MSR.
brisance 14y ago
Microsoft is this generation's Xerox PARC if they can't ship whatever is in their R&D labs.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"Redmond spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future." Two words, Xerox PARC. At Sun there was a weird joke that Sun Labs was where good ideas went to die. It was frustrating. The point here is that good R&D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work. Strangely the hardest thing about that is not making a product out of it, the hardest thing is making a product you can ship. Good R&D isn't constrained, which is to say that you don't tell the folks doing the research you are only researching things we can sell for a profit, but that is a constraint on products. What happens is the 'Apple effect' where you have a bunch of researchers who can't make a profitable product (Xerox Star) and then a product guy comes along (Steve Jobs) who sees the essence of the innovation, and can strip away the parts where it goes too far and ships that. Its really challenging to build something close to your vision and not ship it, it seems like it is impossible to build something that is close to your vision and then ship something only half as close as that. But that is where the success can be. "Fumbling the Future" [1] is a fascinating read for that reason. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660 http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...
- aristidb 14y ago
  Another example: Nokia. Right before the iPhone was introduced, Nokia's R&D budget was _huge_ compared to Apple's. I guess that proves that Nokia is more innovative than Apple?
  - wisty 14y ago
    http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/04/nokia-employs-as-many-engineers-for-symbian-and-meego-as-apple-does-for-all-its-product-lines/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/04/nokia-employs-as-many-engin... Nokia developed HW, Symbian, S40, MeeGoo, and services. It also spent a bit on actual research. Pure research often pays off (in unpredictable ways). Developing a number of platforms turned out to be a bad idea.
    - timthorn 14y ago
manojlds 14y ago
"As far as 99.9 percent of the world population is concerned" I bet a large percentage of the population in the world doesn't even know about Microsoft.
mtgx 14y ago
> "Redmond spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future." More like Microsoft wastes more money on R&D that doesn't convert in revolutionary products more than both Apple and Google combined. We've always known Microsoft spends a lot on R&D and they like to make those "20 years from now" videos, but I haven't seen much come out of it. Last year they even bragged about how they had the idea for the iPhone 20 years ago. But so what? How did that help them? At best it helped them create Windows Mobile and the PDA's 10 years later, but that was a niche market, and Microsoft never had much market share with Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, which was a lot smaller than the current smartphone market back then. So I guess the moral of the story is that "lab inventions" don't mean much, and you could waste a lot of money on them, and with very little to show for it in the market. I'm pretty sure the $2 billion dollar Kin project was part of that R&D spending, too.
- pron 14y ago
  Lab inventions aren't meant to be successful in the market, and I'm not sure Microsoft is doing all that research just for financial gain, but even if it is, and it's not succesful -- so what? It is actually quite known in the tech industry (among those who really care about technology and not just business) that after the slow decline of Bell Labs and Sun Labs, the two most innovative tech companies are IBM and Microsoft. Actually, I've always assumed everybody knows this. I don't know if it means Microsoft (or IBM) "has a future", but who cares? There's so much good stuff coming from those two companies (or their research divisions to be exact), so why not just enjoy it? Also, I don't know how it works at Microsoft, but at IBM Research, the company is responsible for only half the funding. The researchers have to secure the rest themselves from grants and such, just like in any academic institution.
- DanBC 14y ago
  > More like Microsoft wastes more money on R&D that doesn't convert in revolutionary products [...] This sentence is weird to read here. We have a big company spending money on science that is not tied to what they can sell. That is a good thing. I am disappointed that anyone on HN can say anything different. Of course, we could have a discussion about the difficulties of running pure research alongside a commercial arm. But that's not what your comment is doing.
addlepate 14y ago
Isn't their R&D work being such a well-kept secret exactly the problem?
BobWarfield 14y ago
Microsoft Research was founded by Nathan Myhrvold. Maybe it's just a patent trolling scam? Cheers, BW
orionblastar 14y ago
Microsoft should have spent some of that money improving the quality control of their software. To learn that changing the GUI of Windows 8 was not that good of an idea. Microsoft should have used R&D to make products more affordable.
lionspaw 14y ago
This is silly. Microsoft doesn't have the culture for any kind of innovation at this point. -ex-microsoftie
joezydeco 14y ago
My irony sensor gets kind of pegged when I see all these interesting Microsoft research projects using the Kinect and Kinect-related sensing technologies, but Microsoft had to go and buy the original tech from PrimeSense. http://www.cultofmac.com/67951/how-apple-almost-got-microsofts-kinect-game-controller/ http://www.cultofmac.com/67951/how-apple-almost-got-microsof...
- polyfractal 14y ago
  Like how Apple bought the core technology for Siri? Just because it was purchased doesn't meant they haven't helped push the technology forward, either in pure R&D or by just promoting adoption.
- mousetraps 14y ago
  PrimeSense provided a low cost chip, but Microsoft: - did the product design and put it into a friendly package (take apart a Kinect some day, they did some neat stuff in there) - developed the body tracking algorithm (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/BodyPartRecognition.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/BodyPartRecognitio...). - developed the microphone array, speech recognition algorithms - provided developers the resources they needed to take advantage of the device - applied it well to gaming and quickly brought it to market - put the technology in the hands of millions, triggering even more innovation
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    So what was in the SDK that PrimeSense was packaging with their reference design before the launch of the Kinect? http://pr.cs.cornell.edu/humanactivities/data/NITE.pdf http://pr.cs.cornell.edu/humanactivities/data/NITE.pdf
    - mousetraps 14y ago
      They had skeletal tracking, but it wasn't reliable enough for consumer applications: - OpenNI requires a calibration pose, while the technique Microsoft uses allows players to walk in and out of the frame. Kinect would not have succeeded if people had to calibrate it all the time. - Microsoft does predictive analysis so it's much better in non-optimal environments (e.g. a living room) or in cases where it loses track of a body part because it's behind something. - Also. To train it. Microsoft generated and processed millions of depth images from mocap data taken of people of all sorts of different shapes in sizes in all sorts of environments. It's insane. And of course they needed new algorithms to manage that... - Lastly - no audio/speech or 3D facial expression tracking in NITE
at-fates-hands 14y ago
"The point here is that good R&D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work" This is my biggest beef with MS. They consistently wait for other companies to innovate, then wait to see if the market will support it. Only when they see an advantage to developing their own version of a product will they enter a market. You can look at their MP3 player the Zune, you can also look at how long it took them to get into the smartphone and tablet markets. I'm wondering if there are any concrete examples of them releasing a product which has utilized their arm of R&D for a specific product and pointed to it as a reason why it's available to the public. Similar to how Google always touts their R&D teams for developing a myriad of their products.
- kapnobatairza 14y ago
  I am not quite sure if I buy this argument. Microsoft certainly attempts to "productize", they simply fail on execution: When the iPod was still "only" an MP3 player, Microsoft was pushing video capable PMPs through their PMC software. Microsoft was betting on the tablet long before Apple. Windows CE based Wizard style PDAs predate the Apple Newton, and Pocket PC was largely successful and shows Microsoft have been trying to get a Mobile OS into your pocket for nearly 20 years. It was largely Palm and Microsoft that built out this space. The PocketPC iPaq even had a GSM jacket that allowed it to be used as a phone, making it a smartphone that predates even the earliest Ericsson/Nokia smartphones. Not to mention Windows Mobile which predates iOS and Android by many years. Microsoft has been working on WebTV, Media Center and Xbox to get into your living room long before AppleTV or Google TV. Microsoft has certainly attempted to productize on the ideas that come out of Microsoft Research and is almost always on the cutting edge of technology, and in many cases years ahead. The problem is that they don't have the same unified vision many other companies do, so when they execute they do so poorly: With incomplete products in an incoherent package. Microsoft's problem isn't that they aren't making enough products, it is that they are sometimes too big and disorganized to make them good enough that people can see the underlying value.
  - vardump 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator 1996. Web browser, email, calendar and can run apps. I also had an iPaq, but that was only a few years later. Great little devices apart from the browser and activestink.
aresant 14y ago
In this article I see a MSFT strategy unfolding of skipping the current smart-phone mobile battlefield, and leaping directly into full-bore cyborg computing. Bear with me, they've effectively laid out all the pieces: - A "omni touch" interface that allows for interaction without physical input devices. - A variety of leaps forward for Kinect to map and translate your physical environment to a data stream. - A "holodeck" and other tools that overlay interface design onto physical objects. - Foveated 3d graphics and other leaps forward that would drastically reduce hardware costs for graphic rendering. Nearly every one of these projects are directly applicable to the "wearable computer" concept. I wonder if, looking back in 10 years, we'll see that MSFT's currnet weak smart-phone entries were ultimately not that important to their overall strategy.
- krschultz 14y ago
  The real question: will the executives at Microsoft be able to drive that strategy based on the pieces R&D is giving them? Historically, Microsoft R&D has come up with some great stuff, it just really hasn't made it into their user products. Bill Gates was hammering on tablets and touch interfaces for years, but Apple made it happen. They have had great microkernel OS or modern language OS R&D projects, yet the Windows kernel hasn't changed dramatically. There is a missing step between R&D and revolutionary product improvements.
- JPKab 14y ago
  I agree with you here, but I don't think the "weak smart phone strategy" is necessarily by design. Honestly, I think they have a solid smart phone product, but were so late that they won't get the solid ecosystem of apps they need. My issue with this article is that it forgets about the ugly side of Microsoft: delaying the sale of innovative new things to protect old profit centers in the enterprise market. Does anyone really believe that Microsoft CAN'T make editing hosted documents in Sharepoint as seamless and smooth as Google Docs? I truly believe that they have chosen to neuter a lot of their collaborative, web app based software to keep their old trusy desktop software (Office) profit center alive and kicking. They benefit from this, in the short term, in two ways: If the latest version of Office has new features, they sell the upgrades and make bank. Because it's desktop, they can say "you need Windows 8 (or whatever is latest and greatest) to run it Mrs. CIO." So then they make the OS sale too.
TwistedWeasel 14y ago
Spending money on research is always good, Microsoft Research has always had a lot of good ideas and generated some truly amazing prototypes and research papers. It's a good thing for the community in general the have people working on this stuff but it's not necessarily a good business investment for MS if they can't leverage the work into viable products. Many companies like to fund R&D divisions as a means to attract the best minds from the academic community in the hopes that they will benefit from their talent in some way. It's often not directed work but more of a recruitment tool. The best professors bring with them the best students and many of those students end up working on products not just research. However, in my time at Microsoft I worked with the research team on a couple of occasions trying leverage their ideas into real products with little success. We would send them some interesting problems (in one case we asked them to spend some time on snow accumulation algorithms for a snowboarding game) and they would disappear for months and return with a cool demo that was impressive but usually failed to meet the given criteria that allowed it to be used in a shipping product. e.g. speed, memory efficiency, data size requirements etc.
- zaidf 14y ago
  Curious: What precise things were problematic? Their disappearing for months? Their not communicating enough? Them royally ignoring practical guidelines from you re: speed, memory etc?
  - TwistedWeasel 14y ago
    All of the above, but most of all not keeping within the required parameters that would have made their solution usable.
sbuccini 14y ago
As a current student, these are the types of projects that made me want to study this field. Does anyone know if it's even possible to get a job at one of these R&D centers with just an undergrad degree? What sort of things can I do to make myself a more viable candidate for one of these research labs?
- munchbunny 14y ago
  No, not really. I've heard of a few exceptions in the past, and in all cases these were people with highly successful careers spanning at least a decade. That said, if you ever become a PhD candidate in CS, you should apply to MSR for a summer. It's an amazing place to expand your network as a researcher.
- kvb 14y ago
  Probably not as a researcher, but as a software engineer I suspect only an undergrad degree is needed for some positions.
mav3r1ck 14y ago
This should come as no surprise to those that are familiar with MSR (Microsoft Research). I've had the fortune of visiting the place a few times and it is amazing, especially the people they get to come in for research (even the interns are geniuses). Even if you don't know of MSR, this should be of no surprise if you have any recall of the news you read over the years. A lot of the work they do has appeared in the NYTimes and such. For example, I remember very clearly that about 6 years ago, Bill Gates basically said that robots are the future. It didn't take me long to find articles and website to remind myself of what he said (see link below). Although Bill Gates is no longer CEO, he is still chairman and you can certainly bet that MSR will be leading the way in this research. http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-robots-microsoft-robotics-studio/ http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-r...
__abc 14y ago
Awesome, now bring it to market. Until then, as a consumer, I could care less about Microsoft. All their amazing R&D didn't make W8, their phones, or their tablets any more enjoyable or purchasable.
robomartin 14y ago
If the tech world has proven anything at all it is that: huge budget != disruptive innovation At least not as a rule. Think about how most (all?) of the top tech companies you know about started: garages, dorms and kitchen tables. HP, Apple, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sure, some needed huge money to scale, but the genesis of the idea-turned-product did not require millions or billions to generate. Sometimes you have to wonder if hunger is far more valuable than money to spur innovation. I happen to think so. And, while I do not diminish the work being done at companies like MS, sometimes I feel that they are just throwing money at PhD's who are having a great time playing with interesting tech but simply don't have the drive, hunger and urgency to make something more than a great research gig out of it.
- tellarin 14y ago
  Research != innovation Research != R&D Not trying to antagonize you, just pointing an issue that seems pretty common in this article discussion.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jonchris 14y ago
I feel sixth sense device concept: http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potenti...
gjmveloso 14y ago
If this P&D budget was splitted on long-term-10-years-go-to-market products and really useful and fast increments on current Microsoft products, maybe Microsoft could be the current Google. Or Apple ;) It's weird a company have the funniest R&D labs and its main product - Windows - still sucks with 80' Windows Registry structure or a file system which fragments a lot.
ndbos 14y ago
Whats even more clever is that the 9.6 Billion only actually "cost" 4.8 Billion (R&D Classified Work is a 50% tax deduction)
ilaksh 14y ago
Interesting to see such an amazingly positive article on the front page at the same time as the scathing Forbes piece. I wonder if that's really a coincidence. http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/02/microsoft-is-fast-turning-into-a-sideshow/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/02/microsoft-is... Since most of these revolutionary systems aren't available as actual products, I have to assume that Microsoft buys people and ideas mainly to keep them from interfering with their monopolies.
ianstallings 14y ago
I love their R&D department. If only they could mutate Ballmer into a human being using bio-engineering..
rbanffy 14y ago
People have to realize it's not how much money you spend, but how well you spend it, that matters.
Nano2rad 14y ago
Microsoft is part of US military and weapon manufacturers like Boeing, and doing projects for them. Most of MS research is related to military if you look close. Also now it is protected from any acquisition.
ucee054 14y ago
What academics (eg Microsoft Research) mean by "innovation" is "what lets us publish papers". What ordinary people mean by "innovation" is "what cool new things can be made available that noticeably change Grandma's life". Most academic work is USELESS for this because it ignores too many constraints, making the market hostile to it. Richard Gabriel did a piece on this, called "Money through innovation reconsidered". Don't buy academic hype.
- stinos 14y ago
  So what is your actual point here? Research is useless? Academics are only about publishing and nothing more? Doesn't make sense. How do you expect eg low-level brain research to be useful for your grandma? It can't, but that does not mean at all it cannot be innovative or that the researchers only care about the next paper.
  - ucee054 14y ago
    I have two points. Point1: Nothing that Microsoft ever does will blaze a new trail of products, they are not an original sort of company. They will always be playing catchup. EG Kinect to WiiMote Point2: Nothing that CS conferences or journals ever publish will blaze a new trail. They too will always be playing catchup. EG first came Facebook, and only afterwards the whole social networking research craze in academia. I exaggerate Point2 a little. There are 1 or 2 Academics who actually make stuff, like Michael Stonebraker. But overall the record is pathetic. Don't buy the hype.
    - pm90 14y ago
      >Point2: Nothing that CS conferences or journals ever publish will blaze a new trail. They too will always be playing catchup. Actually, it was a lot of this published work that resulted in: Internet, Networks, Filesystems, OS(Unix), Compilers(LLVM) etcetc. Granted, a lot of research does not result in any useful product, but that isn't what research is all about. Its about exploring the boundaries of our knowledge. Trying wild ideas that you couldn't do within the time and budget limits of a company... because some of those wild ideas do work spectacularly in the end
sytelus 14y ago
You can see Microsoft Research's contribution to shipping products at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/techtransfer/product-development-contributions-2011.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/techtransfer/produ.... You will be surprised how much stuff has came out of MSR.

180 points by matan_a 14y ago

chayesfss 14y ago

They should throw some money at making adfs a better product

asimjalis 14y ago

Microsoft’s 9B R&D budget is mostly an accounting convenience. They include all product development in R&D.

sek 14y ago
Also the video at the end is just a marketing video from the Office department. At least it's not just a marketing vehicle like IBM Research and they build real products like Kinect. But that was also a bought company afaik and didn't come out of MS R&D.
RyJones 14y ago
Have you read a p&l from msft?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bediger4000 14y ago

I'll grant you that my personal anecdote is a few years old, but... Maybe 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to the Dean of the University of Colorado Comp Sci department. I could only remember Benjamin Zorn as a faculty member, so I dropped the name. By then, Zorn had gotten hired away to Microsoft R&D. The Dean of the Comp Sci department made a number of references to Microsoft R&D as a "research roach hotel" - researcher's go in, but no papers ever come out. If Microsoft R&D is a secret, then it's Microsoft's own problem, I assume.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pmrondon 14y ago
At least in the area of programming languages this could not be further from the truth - papers from MSR are a significant portion of every year's POPL and PLDI proceedings.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Not to mention siggraph and...sosp/osdi. Ad publishing isn't a panacea, there are many ways we should be communicating, if anything we publish too many papers as researchers.
brudgers 14y ago
Here you will find 10,000 publications from Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=publications http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pu... That appears to be about four orders of magnitude more research than that used to fact check your story.
- marshray 14y ago
  I look forward to reading http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=179572 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1795... this one about Halo combat skill development: Using these ratings from 7 months of games from over 3 million players, we look at how play intensity, breaks in play, skill change over time, and other titles affect skill.
munchbunny 14y ago
It'd be pretty difficult to recruit professors and researchers (whose professional careers depend on publishing papers) to do research for several years in a place where they can't publish. MSR encourages publishing almost to a fault. They even have a portion of their legal department specifically trained to support MSR's researchers so that the "corporate" tendencies from the rest of Microsoft don't bleed into MSR.

brisance 14y ago

Microsoft is this generation's Xerox PARC if they can't ship whatever is in their R&D labs.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

"Redmond spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future." Two words, Xerox PARC. At Sun there was a weird joke that Sun Labs was where good ideas went to die. It was frustrating. The point here is that good R&D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work. Strangely the hardest thing about that is not making a product out of it, the hardest thing is making a product you can ship. Good R&D isn't constrained, which is to say that you don't tell the folks doing the research you are only researching things we can sell for a profit, but that is a constraint on products. What happens is the 'Apple effect' where you have a bunch of researchers who can't make a profitable product (Xerox Star) and then a product guy comes along (Steve Jobs) who sees the essence of the innovation, and can strip away the parts where it goes too far and ships that. Its really challenging to build something close to your vision and not ship it, it seems like it is impossible to build something that is close to your vision and then ship something only half as close as that. But that is where the success can be. "Fumbling the Future" [1] is a fascinating read for that reason. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660 http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...

aristidb 14y ago
Another example: Nokia. Right before the iPhone was introduced, Nokia's R&D budget was _huge_ compared to Apple's. I guess that proves that Nokia is more innovative than Apple?
- wisty 14y ago
  http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/04/nokia-employs-as-many-engineers-for-symbian-and-meego-as-apple-does-for-all-its-product-lines/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/04/nokia-employs-as-many-engin... Nokia developed HW, Symbian, S40, MeeGoo, and services. It also spent a bit on actual research. Pure research often pays off (in unpredictable ways). Developing a number of platforms turned out to be a bad idea.
  - timthorn 14y ago

manojlds 14y ago

"As far as 99.9 percent of the world population is concerned" I bet a large percentage of the population in the world doesn't even know about Microsoft.

mtgx 14y ago

> "Redmond spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future." More like Microsoft wastes more money on R&D that doesn't convert in revolutionary products more than both Apple and Google combined. We've always known Microsoft spends a lot on R&D and they like to make those "20 years from now" videos, but I haven't seen much come out of it. Last year they even bragged about how they had the idea for the iPhone 20 years ago. But so what? How did that help them? At best it helped them create Windows Mobile and the PDA's 10 years later, but that was a niche market, and Microsoft never had much market share with Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, which was a lot smaller than the current smartphone market back then. So I guess the moral of the story is that "lab inventions" don't mean much, and you could waste a lot of money on them, and with very little to show for it in the market. I'm pretty sure the $2 billion dollar Kin project was part of that R&D spending, too.

pron 14y ago
Lab inventions aren't meant to be successful in the market, and I'm not sure Microsoft is doing all that research just for financial gain, but even if it is, and it's not succesful -- so what? It is actually quite known in the tech industry (among those who really care about technology and not just business) that after the slow decline of Bell Labs and Sun Labs, the two most innovative tech companies are IBM and Microsoft. Actually, I've always assumed everybody knows this. I don't know if it means Microsoft (or IBM) "has a future", but who cares? There's so much good stuff coming from those two companies (or their research divisions to be exact), so why not just enjoy it? Also, I don't know how it works at Microsoft, but at IBM Research, the company is responsible for only half the funding. The researchers have to secure the rest themselves from grants and such, just like in any academic institution.
DanBC 14y ago
> More like Microsoft wastes more money on R&D that doesn't convert in revolutionary products [...] This sentence is weird to read here. We have a big company spending money on science that is not tied to what they can sell. That is a good thing. I am disappointed that anyone on HN can say anything different. Of course, we could have a discussion about the difficulties of running pure research alongside a commercial arm. But that's not what your comment is doing.

addlepate 14y ago

Isn't their R&D work being such a well-kept secret exactly the problem?

BobWarfield 14y ago

Microsoft Research was founded by Nathan Myhrvold. Maybe it's just a patent trolling scam? Cheers, BW

orionblastar 14y ago

Microsoft should have spent some of that money improving the quality control of their software. To learn that changing the GUI of Windows 8 was not that good of an idea. Microsoft should have used R&D to make products more affordable.

lionspaw 14y ago

This is silly. Microsoft doesn't have the culture for any kind of innovation at this point. -ex-microsoftie

joezydeco 14y ago

My irony sensor gets kind of pegged when I see all these interesting Microsoft research projects using the Kinect and Kinect-related sensing technologies, but Microsoft had to go and buy the original tech from PrimeSense. http://www.cultofmac.com/67951/how-apple-almost-got-microsofts-kinect-game-controller/ http://www.cultofmac.com/67951/how-apple-almost-got-microsof...

polyfractal 14y ago
Like how Apple bought the core technology for Siri? Just because it was purchased doesn't meant they haven't helped push the technology forward, either in pure R&D or by just promoting adoption.
mousetraps 14y ago
PrimeSense provided a low cost chip, but Microsoft: - did the product design and put it into a friendly package (take apart a Kinect some day, they did some neat stuff in there) - developed the body tracking algorithm (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/BodyPartRecognition.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/BodyPartRecognitio...). - developed the microphone array, speech recognition algorithms - provided developers the resources they needed to take advantage of the device - applied it well to gaming and quickly brought it to market - put the technology in the hands of millions, triggering even more innovation
- joezydeco 14y ago
  So what was in the SDK that PrimeSense was packaging with their reference design before the launch of the Kinect? http://pr.cs.cornell.edu/humanactivities/data/NITE.pdf http://pr.cs.cornell.edu/humanactivities/data/NITE.pdf
  - mousetraps 14y ago
    They had skeletal tracking, but it wasn't reliable enough for consumer applications: - OpenNI requires a calibration pose, while the technique Microsoft uses allows players to walk in and out of the frame. Kinect would not have succeeded if people had to calibrate it all the time. - Microsoft does predictive analysis so it's much better in non-optimal environments (e.g. a living room) or in cases where it loses track of a body part because it's behind something. - Also. To train it. Microsoft generated and processed millions of depth images from mocap data taken of people of all sorts of different shapes in sizes in all sorts of environments. It's insane. And of course they needed new algorithms to manage that... - Lastly - no audio/speech or 3D facial expression tracking in NITE

at-fates-hands 14y ago

"The point here is that good R&D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work" This is my biggest beef with MS. They consistently wait for other companies to innovate, then wait to see if the market will support it. Only when they see an advantage to developing their own version of a product will they enter a market. You can look at their MP3 player the Zune, you can also look at how long it took them to get into the smartphone and tablet markets. I'm wondering if there are any concrete examples of them releasing a product which has utilized their arm of R&D for a specific product and pointed to it as a reason why it's available to the public. Similar to how Google always touts their R&D teams for developing a myriad of their products.

kapnobatairza 14y ago
I am not quite sure if I buy this argument. Microsoft certainly attempts to "productize", they simply fail on execution: When the iPod was still "only" an MP3 player, Microsoft was pushing video capable PMPs through their PMC software. Microsoft was betting on the tablet long before Apple. Windows CE based Wizard style PDAs predate the Apple Newton, and Pocket PC was largely successful and shows Microsoft have been trying to get a Mobile OS into your pocket for nearly 20 years. It was largely Palm and Microsoft that built out this space. The PocketPC iPaq even had a GSM jacket that allowed it to be used as a phone, making it a smartphone that predates even the earliest Ericsson/Nokia smartphones. Not to mention Windows Mobile which predates iOS and Android by many years. Microsoft has been working on WebTV, Media Center and Xbox to get into your living room long before AppleTV or Google TV. Microsoft has certainly attempted to productize on the ideas that come out of Microsoft Research and is almost always on the cutting edge of technology, and in many cases years ahead. The problem is that they don't have the same unified vision many other companies do, so when they execute they do so poorly: With incomplete products in an incoherent package. Microsoft's problem isn't that they aren't making enough products, it is that they are sometimes too big and disorganized to make them good enough that people can see the underlying value.
- vardump 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator 1996. Web browser, email, calendar and can run apps. I also had an iPaq, but that was only a few years later. Great little devices apart from the browser and activestink.

aresant 14y ago

In this article I see a MSFT strategy unfolding of skipping the current smart-phone mobile battlefield, and leaping directly into full-bore cyborg computing. Bear with me, they've effectively laid out all the pieces: - A "omni touch" interface that allows for interaction without physical input devices. - A variety of leaps forward for Kinect to map and translate your physical environment to a data stream. - A "holodeck" and other tools that overlay interface design onto physical objects. - Foveated 3d graphics and other leaps forward that would drastically reduce hardware costs for graphic rendering. Nearly every one of these projects are directly applicable to the "wearable computer" concept. I wonder if, looking back in 10 years, we'll see that MSFT's currnet weak smart-phone entries were ultimately not that important to their overall strategy.

krschultz 14y ago
The real question: will the executives at Microsoft be able to drive that strategy based on the pieces R&D is giving them? Historically, Microsoft R&D has come up with some great stuff, it just really hasn't made it into their user products. Bill Gates was hammering on tablets and touch interfaces for years, but Apple made it happen. They have had great microkernel OS or modern language OS R&D projects, yet the Windows kernel hasn't changed dramatically. There is a missing step between R&D and revolutionary product improvements.
JPKab 14y ago
I agree with you here, but I don't think the "weak smart phone strategy" is necessarily by design. Honestly, I think they have a solid smart phone product, but were so late that they won't get the solid ecosystem of apps they need. My issue with this article is that it forgets about the ugly side of Microsoft: delaying the sale of innovative new things to protect old profit centers in the enterprise market. Does anyone really believe that Microsoft CAN'T make editing hosted documents in Sharepoint as seamless and smooth as Google Docs? I truly believe that they have chosen to neuter a lot of their collaborative, web app based software to keep their old trusy desktop software (Office) profit center alive and kicking. They benefit from this, in the short term, in two ways: If the latest version of Office has new features, they sell the upgrades and make bank. Because it's desktop, they can say "you need Windows 8 (or whatever is latest and greatest) to run it Mrs. CIO." So then they make the OS sale too.

TwistedWeasel 14y ago

Spending money on research is always good, Microsoft Research has always had a lot of good ideas and generated some truly amazing prototypes and research papers. It's a good thing for the community in general the have people working on this stuff but it's not necessarily a good business investment for MS if they can't leverage the work into viable products. Many companies like to fund R&D divisions as a means to attract the best minds from the academic community in the hopes that they will benefit from their talent in some way. It's often not directed work but more of a recruitment tool. The best professors bring with them the best students and many of those students end up working on products not just research. However, in my time at Microsoft I worked with the research team on a couple of occasions trying leverage their ideas into real products with little success. We would send them some interesting problems (in one case we asked them to spend some time on snow accumulation algorithms for a snowboarding game) and they would disappear for months and return with a cool demo that was impressive but usually failed to meet the given criteria that allowed it to be used in a shipping product. e.g. speed, memory efficiency, data size requirements etc.

zaidf 14y ago
Curious: What precise things were problematic? Their disappearing for months? Their not communicating enough? Them royally ignoring practical guidelines from you re: speed, memory etc?
- TwistedWeasel 14y ago
  All of the above, but most of all not keeping within the required parameters that would have made their solution usable.

sbuccini 14y ago

As a current student, these are the types of projects that made me want to study this field. Does anyone know if it's even possible to get a job at one of these R&D centers with just an undergrad degree? What sort of things can I do to make myself a more viable candidate for one of these research labs?

munchbunny 14y ago
No, not really. I've heard of a few exceptions in the past, and in all cases these were people with highly successful careers spanning at least a decade. That said, if you ever become a PhD candidate in CS, you should apply to MSR for a summer. It's an amazing place to expand your network as a researcher.
kvb 14y ago
Probably not as a researcher, but as a software engineer I suspect only an undergrad degree is needed for some positions.

mav3r1ck 14y ago

This should come as no surprise to those that are familiar with MSR (Microsoft Research). I've had the fortune of visiting the place a few times and it is amazing, especially the people they get to come in for research (even the interns are geniuses). Even if you don't know of MSR, this should be of no surprise if you have any recall of the news you read over the years. A lot of the work they do has appeared in the NYTimes and such. For example, I remember very clearly that about 6 years ago, Bill Gates basically said that robots are the future. It didn't take me long to find articles and website to remind myself of what he said (see link below). Although Bill Gates is no longer CEO, he is still chairman and you can certainly bet that MSR will be leading the way in this research. http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-robots-microsoft-robotics-studio/ http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-r...

__abc 14y ago

Awesome, now bring it to market. Until then, as a consumer, I could care less about Microsoft. All their amazing R&D didn't make W8, their phones, or their tablets any more enjoyable or purchasable.

robomartin 14y ago

If the tech world has proven anything at all it is that: huge budget != disruptive innovation At least not as a rule. Think about how most (all?) of the top tech companies you know about started: garages, dorms and kitchen tables. HP, Apple, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sure, some needed huge money to scale, but the genesis of the idea-turned-product did not require millions or billions to generate. Sometimes you have to wonder if hunger is far more valuable than money to spur innovation. I happen to think so. And, while I do not diminish the work being done at companies like MS, sometimes I feel that they are just throwing money at PhD's who are having a great time playing with interesting tech but simply don't have the drive, hunger and urgency to make something more than a great research gig out of it.

tellarin 14y ago
Research != innovation Research != R&D Not trying to antagonize you, just pointing an issue that seems pretty common in this article discussion.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jonchris 14y ago

I feel sixth sense device concept: http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potenti...

gjmveloso 14y ago

If this P&D budget was splitted on long-term-10-years-go-to-market products and really useful and fast increments on current Microsoft products, maybe Microsoft could be the current Google. Or Apple ;) It's weird a company have the funniest R&D labs and its main product - Windows - still sucks with 80' Windows Registry structure or a file system which fragments a lot.

ndbos 14y ago

Whats even more clever is that the 9.6 Billion only actually "cost" 4.8 Billion (R&D Classified Work is a 50% tax deduction)

ilaksh 14y ago

Interesting to see such an amazingly positive article on the front page at the same time as the scathing Forbes piece. I wonder if that's really a coincidence. http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/02/microsoft-is-fast-turning-into-a-sideshow/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/02/microsoft-is... Since most of these revolutionary systems aren't available as actual products, I have to assume that Microsoft buys people and ideas mainly to keep them from interfering with their monopolies.

ianstallings 14y ago

I love their R&D department. If only they could mutate Ballmer into a human being using bio-engineering..

rbanffy 14y ago

People have to realize it's not how much money you spend, but how well you spend it, that matters.

Nano2rad 14y ago

Microsoft is part of US military and weapon manufacturers like Boeing, and doing projects for them. Most of MS research is related to military if you look close. Also now it is protected from any acquisition.

ucee054 14y ago

What academics (eg Microsoft Research) mean by "innovation" is "what lets us publish papers". What ordinary people mean by "innovation" is "what cool new things can be made available that noticeably change Grandma's life". Most academic work is USELESS for this because it ignores too many constraints, making the market hostile to it. Richard Gabriel did a piece on this, called "Money through innovation reconsidered". Don't buy academic hype.

stinos 14y ago
So what is your actual point here? Research is useless? Academics are only about publishing and nothing more? Doesn't make sense. How do you expect eg low-level brain research to be useful for your grandma? It can't, but that does not mean at all it cannot be innovative or that the researchers only care about the next paper.
- ucee054 14y ago
  I have two points. Point1: Nothing that Microsoft ever does will blaze a new trail of products, they are not an original sort of company. They will always be playing catchup. EG Kinect to WiiMote Point2: Nothing that CS conferences or journals ever publish will blaze a new trail. They too will always be playing catchup. EG first came Facebook, and only afterwards the whole social networking research craze in academia. I exaggerate Point2 a little. There are 1 or 2 Academics who actually make stuff, like Michael Stonebraker. But overall the record is pathetic. Don't buy the hype.
  - pm90 14y ago
    >Point2: Nothing that CS conferences or journals ever publish will blaze a new trail. They too will always be playing catchup. Actually, it was a lot of this published work that resulted in: Internet, Networks, Filesystems, OS(Unix), Compilers(LLVM) etcetc. Granted, a lot of research does not result in any useful product, but that isn't what research is all about. Its about exploring the boundaries of our knowledge. Trying wild ideas that you couldn't do within the time and budget limits of a company... because some of those wild ideas do work spectacularly in the end

sytelus 14y ago

You can see Microsoft Research's contribution to shipping products at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/techtransfer/product-development-contributions-2011.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/techtransfer/produ.... You will be surprised how much stuff has came out of MSR.