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Microsoft to Close Microsoft Research Lab in Silicon Valley
- scythe 12y agoMy immediate assumption is that they're just moving it to Santa Barbara, where they established a facility in 2005: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/stationq/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/stationq/default.as... That's not so far away; it's easy for an organization like Microsoft, with no ties to SV or need for them, to relocate when real estate becomes a problem.
- arjunnarayan 12y agoMSR Station Q (at Santa Barbara) is 12 researchers. MSR SVC was about 75.
- arjunnarayan 12y agoI see that this is being spun as part of the larger layoffs at Microsoft in general, but make no mistake, this is highly unusual for an institution as distinguished and well respected as Microsoft Research (both internally at Microsoft, and externally amongst academia in general) I think there is much more under the surface than is visible here. We'll have to wait for the official PR story from Microsoft (which I'm sure will clarify nothing at all). But for now I remain puzzled at this move.
- rtkwe 12y agoThis isn't their only lab location though. Microsoft Research isn't going away, just what's probably one of their more expensive locations.
- hga 12y agoYeah, as quoted in the article, a "Microsoft spokesperson" said they were consolidating west coast labs, and before that, a sign that they don't want to lose some of these people: "[Confirms the report] and noted that an undisclosed number of those researchers will be offered jobs at other Microsoft Research labs."
- ZanyProgrammer 12y agoI think there's something intangible though, about having some research presence in the middle of Silicon Valley.
- nobodysfool 12y agoThe 'intangibles' you speak of are housing and money.
- tdicola 12y agoI imagine it's tough to be a small division away from the mothership in Seattle. If they aren't constantly making their presence and existence known it's probably easy for execs to write them off as not performing.
- bhouston 12y agoI understood most of Microsoft Research is based in Seattle.
- peterkelly 12y agoMS Research is the only part of the company that actually does anything truly innovative. Oh well...
- Avalaxy 12y agoLike... inventing basically everything that Apple copies months/years later?
- _random_ 12y agoThis is the wrong place to speak the truth :). Let me share your down-votes with you.
- peterkelly 12y agoI understand the downvotes as a knee-jerk reaction, but the thing to understand here is that MS research is largely separate from the product development side. Spend some time having a look at some of their publications and you'll see what i mean. Examples - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/barrelfish/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/barrelfish/ - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fsharp/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fsharp/
- majorsc2noob 12y agoYou do know that fsharp is a pretty big deal for Microsoft and is shipped as part of Visual Studio, one of their biggest products, right?
- Someone1234 12y agoI don't understand why you and the other person are trying to "correct" them? I thought their point was obvious: MS Research innovates, and then links examples (including F# which goes on to be a successful product as you pointed out). F# being in full production doesn't disprove what they said, it further proves it. PS - I disagree with the person above's proposition that MS Research is the "only" innovate branch of Microsoft. I am just posting to get clarification on what you and the other poster are getting at.
- dude_abides 12y agoPlease correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time ever a Microsoft Research lab is being closed? It reflects a lot on how the new CEO Nadella views fundamental (academic) research in his priority list. Though this may be the right move for MSFT shareholders, this is certainly a backward step for computer science research as a whole. MSR is the last remaining industry lab which focuses on pure academic research, and I hope MSR remains.
- brwnll 12y agoI disagree with this statement. Contrarily, closing the Valley location could be an indicator Nadella holds a high value on the other world wide locations. If your hope is to attract top global talent to work on global issues, having two labs nearly on top of each other in Santa Barbara and the Valley doesn't make much since. Current lab locations: Redmond, WA; Cambridge, UK; Beijing, China; Munich, Germany; Bangalore, India; Santa Barbara, CA; Cairo, Egypt; Herzelia, Isreal.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago> having two labs nearly on top of each other in Santa Barbara and the Valley doesn't make much sense. I think you may be confusing Santa Barbara, which is close to Los Angeles and approximately 5 hours drive from the Valley, with the closer Santa Clara, which is in the Valley, or Santa Cruz, which is about an hour south of the Valley.
- jhenkens 12y agoI'm just starting my sixth year at UCSB (undergrad + MS), and I never knew about this, but apparently there is an MSR office inside of UCSB's campus! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/stationq/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/stationq/ That said, I wasn't sure if your comment was saying they were just confused at to where Santa Barbara is located, or if there was only labs in Santa Clara, not in Santa Barbara. That said, I find it very strange to close the SV MSR office. Lot's of California-only folks who don't want to move to the tourist-city of SB/don't fit into the MSR-StationQ at UCSB now are off the market.
- davmre 12y agoMSR Silicon Valley is a satellite office, smaller than Redmond, Cambridge, Beijing, and probably several others. Still, it employs (employed?) some heavy hitters, including Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport. Many of these people will probably receive offers to relocate, per the article, but presumably not everyone wants to move to Redmond, hence the existence of the SV lab in the first place. So some will leave Microsoft and seek jobs elsewhere, as will all the researchers that don't receive relocation offers. As some of my grad student friends have observed, this may be a tough year to be on the academic/research job market...
- AceJohnny2 12y ago> including Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport I can think of one or two companies in the Silicon Valley who are salivating at the idea of hiring the pioneer of distributed systems.
- arjunnarayan 12y agoPossibly one of those companies down the road from MSR SV with the multicolored bikes.
- JetSpiegel 12y agoYou mean the inventor of LaTeX. And by "mean", I mean "also".
- it_learnses 12y agoYou also the inventor of LaTex?
- presty 12y agoThese layoffs remind me of when Yahoo did the same with Yahoo Research. You know what happened next... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-google-hiring-researchers-yahoo-is-firing-rumor/10508 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-google-hiring-re...
- curiousDog 12y ago
- Someone1234 12y agoI thought Microsoft's stated goal for these layoffs was to reduce the amount of managerial indirection, remember this catchy quote from the layoff announcement: > fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making. But yet the vast majority of people who have been laid off have been engineers or other "boots on the ground" types. It doesn't really sound like Microsoft is doing anything about their huge internal political debt (that makes them so inflexible and slow moving). Plus, to me, sacking your research people is never a "good" indicator for a company. That either means that your research was entirely misguided OR that you've just given up on new innovation/first to market. If I was a long term Microsoft shareholder I'd definitely have mixed feelings right now. On one hand Microsoft has made cost savings, but on the other hand it might be at the cost of their long term growth. ... We'll just have to wait and see how this all turns out...
- tdicola 12y agoThe extra irony is cutting jobs and research while spending billions to buy a game franchise.
- MrZongle2 12y agoI imagine the short term ROI for Minecraft is much higher. That isn't to say the SV team isn't doing great work that could eventually be of colossal importance... but if it can't be quantified on a spreadsheet, the bean-counters don't consider it.
- teej 12y agoI don't see any irony. This tiny layoff (~2% of the workforce) is completely unrelated to a franchise purchase to drive growth in the entertainment division. Microsoft isn't hurting, it's reorganizing.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y agoIt makes MSFT look some combination of bad/inept/stupid in Silicon Valley. Its obviously not quantifiable in the MBA fashion, but especially in Silicon Valley MSFT needs as much of a good presence as it can get, I think.
- Mandatum 12y agoRnD is expensive enough as it is, wouldn't it make sense to move out of Startup Valley?
- make3 12y agoWhile I agree that SV is expensive, I think most people agree that the talent there is really not restricted to startups. Google, IBM Almaden Research Center, to name a few, and then there's obviously Stanford and Berkeley very close.
- vonmoltke 12y agoMost people also agree that there is a severe lack of available talent in the area and that it seems to be difficult to pull in people from out-of-area. This creates a cycle where companies hire significant numbers of people from competitors in the Valley. Perhaps MS decided that the cost of playing this game was no longer worth the benefits.
- thetrb 12y agoI definitely would not say that most people agree to this. Otherwise it would be very surprising to see Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung and many others growing their presence in Silicon Valley.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoMicrosoft still has a big office in silicon valley to do product R&D. This refers to a research lab.
- loldude 12y agohahahahaahahahaha
- loldude 12y agohahahahahahaha
- santaclaus 12y agoWord on the street is that only six members of the research lab were offered jobs at other Microsoft Research locations...
- dicroce 12y agoI guess they already figured out all the things?
- martincmartin 12y agoI wonder about the fate of the Microsoft New England R&D Center in Cambridge, MA.
- rchowe 12y agoIt's probably still valuable for Microsoft to have an east coast presence, especially if it allows them to recruit from Boston-area tech schools, MIT especially.
- keithpeter 12y agoDoes this include Jaron Lanier and his team?
- ranran876 12y agoI can't think of anything from Microsoft Research that has translated into an actual product (other than maybe the Kinect.. though I think a lot of that IP was bought). They do some neat stuff I guess, but it seems like a giant money sink. Can anyone prove my wrong? As an aside, I had a professor from the MS Research lab in Santa Barbara who was a complete moron. Seemed like he was some kind of middle manager at MS and then went to Research for an early semi-retirement
- kvb 12y agoTons of stuff has been productized in various forms. .NET generics, for instance, were initially developed in MSR Cambridge. MSR research has contributed to speech recognition, search technologies in Bing, Excel's Flash Fill, SQL Server's Hekaton in-memory architecture, and many other products.
- Someone1234 12y agoThose and thousands more listed here: https://research.microsoft.com/en-US/about/techtransfer/default.aspx https://research.microsoft.com/en-US/about/techtransfer/defa... Just click the years on the sidebar.
- gradstudent 12y agoThere was a bunch of great Algorithmics research coming from Andrew Goldberg's group at MSR SV. I expect the fruits of their labour are implemented in Bing Maps.
- redwood 12y agoI can only imagine who will move into the office space
- muneeb 12y agoThat lab had three turing award winners (Leslie Lamport, Chuck Thacker, and Bob Tarjan as visiting researcher). This is how MSFT treats turing award winners now?
- philwelch 12y agoProbably a smart move, if only because Microsoft was always going to have retention problems in Silicon Valley anyway.
- xnull2guest 12y agoNah, this all has to do with ValueAct Capital, which is known for vulture investment. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/11/microsoft-new-ceo-valueact/5402897/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/11/microsoft-new-... http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/net-us-microsoft-valueact-idUSBRE96I14920130719 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/net-us-microsoft-v... http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/11/microsoft-appoints-valueact-capitals-mason-morfit-to-its-board/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/11/microsoft-appoints-valueact... http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/03/valueact-hedge-funds-huge-microsoft-victory/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/03/valueact-... ValueAct is known for coming in, increasing dividends, then dumping and selling parts of the company and soaking in the profits - then leaving to work on another firm. The Ballmer 'retirement', after repeated announcements that he wouldn't retire, have everything to do with the stake that VAC bought in Microsoft. They are a patient bunch. If you look at what they want to do with Microsoft, they want to make it an enterprise and cloud only business. They are forcing Microsoft to move away from its OS, for example, and move its services and offerings on other platforms. VAC has a history of waiting long periods of time to gut and sell off the assets of companies. Expect them to try to sell XBox, the recently acquired Nokia, the Surface and its factories and any other such devices and the assets and infrastructure associated with them.
- WmiceJr 12y agoSounds like a good business plan....divide & conquer!!
- discardorama 12y agoPeople are confusing MSR with MSR-SV. MSR-SV is a small(er) outpost; located in SV so they can mop up some talent down here. Their biggest labs are still in Redmond, Cambridge (UK) and Beijing, I think.