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 pl

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.