Actually, IBM walks a tightrope. They want research to be free to do research and there is a certain amount of freedom you have to give them but they also have

Actually, IBM walks a tightrope. They want research to be free to do research and there is a certain amount of freedom you have to give them but they also have quite a record of saying the best research results in products. They also, when the research falls in to a greyer area, have let a lot of it go and many times other companies have started up around some of their stuff. The thinking being that a healthy industry is good for all companies, including IBM and research is part of that. Never mind the stuff they've documented in journals over the years... Some of the materials work IBM does is closer to pure research and starts to look like long-term investment type stuff but make no mistake, there are problems they are looking at which the company plans to profit from the solutions. MS seems to have some other problems, productizing their research is part of their problem, in which case they are likely spending way too much on it. Another, I'm gonna go ahead and say it since it keeps coming up here in different capacities re: IE10 and Windows 8 and other things, they have negative brand equity with the real early adopters and leading edge geek folks due to their years of treachery and just not being nice. While kinnect is cool (very very cool, my 2 year old can play games!) I think I'll wait for Google and Apple to solve the wearable ultra personal computer problems before I'd let MS in to my personal space with some of those phone gadgets. Their final problem, IMO, they still sort of don't get it. Take JPEG-XR, it's a nice piece of work, they even played nice with ISO and it's a standard of sorts; good on them for it but why no BSD or Apache licensed free implementation with a written down patent promise? They planning on drawing funds off that patent? Or would they like digital cameras to start using that stuff? Mono is nearly 8 years old and it's sort of used but largely ignored due to MS and potential patent problems, I think they are very solvable problems. They just don't play well with a lot of others and that kind of undermines the research, it doesn't matter how cool the invention is if you have to eat the rest of their shit with it.