Microsoft Research...why make the effort?
CAMBRIDGE, England--At Microsoft Research's open day here recently, a certain line was heavily promoted. That line: fundamental research helps generate new technologies that give companies competitive advantages.
In some cases, that's unarguable. If Intel shut down its research, it would die overnight. But what would happen if Microsoft stopped doing research? Based on the researchers' demonstrations, I see the answer as not very much.
The ideas on show at the site in Cambridge, while good and interesting, did not address Microsoft's core problems, nor even any of its minor ones. There was research into ecological systems, into displaying networks of influence, into low-power network hardware, into capturing people's lives as a timeline. Try matching those with any known Microsoft strategy--or any conceivable one--in a way that makes compelling sense.
With Intel, you can see the research up on the screen. I've had a briefing from a solid-state physicist on a new transistor design and seen it emerge as a major strand of processor strategy three years later. With Microsoft, it's hard to trace such developments--easier now than it has been, but the link between bright idea and bottom line is very weak.
It's not as if you can't just shut down fundamental R&D. Apple had a classic operation in its Apple Research Labs, which did good work in networking, data recognition, human-computer interaction, and so on. It was highly thought of. Some of its legacies live on in QuickTime, and many other ideas spread throughout the Web and software development.
It ran for 11 years. Two months after he regained control of the company in 1997, Steve Jobs shut it down.
Apple survived the operation. Microsoft would too, purely in terms of the products it makes. That's because big company research in this instance is not primarily about the science and technology, it's about marketing--marketing of a kind Apple decided it just didn't need, but Microsoft needs more than ever. And they're not 21st- or even 20th-century ideas at work: the principles go back much further.
Common misconception
This is hidden by a common misconception about fundamental research. Ask someone to describe a scientist or inventor at work, and you'll get a picture of an eccentric loner crouched over a bench in a deserted lab late at night.
What research is, really, is networking. It's about influence and status and competition and being the first to know, all of which only work well in a large group of peers. Becoming part of a big industrial R&D operation while continuing an academic style of working is landing a plum; there's money, and brand recognition among the laity. And so, the entire research community warms to the idea--and its sponsor.
This works all the way up the chain. The director of a big R&D organization will find doors open and ears pricked at the highest level of universities and government; the divisional head will be lionized at conferences.
You can see why Jobs found this a useless distraction in building the Apple brand, which stands for direct user experience. Microsoft, on the other hand, relishes every chance to become part of the infrastructure of influence. Individuals don't buy Microsoft products: they get them from organizations or by default. Microsoft's most important marketing is to those in power, and what could be a finer advertisement of your suitability for partnership than a big building in Cambridge University filled with happy academics? It worked for King Henry VIII; it can work for Steve Ballmer.
In its own way, the company is influenced too. Being a high-profile public supporter of a social good like fundamental research means you have to look very much as if you take it seriously. The first open-source Microsoft software came from Research's work in IPv6; the academic necessities of collaboration and openness feed both ways and that does the company more good than it'll ever admit on the record.
What research is for, in cases like Microsoft, is status. It's a very tax efficient, with many valuable and wonderful side effects that occasionally benefit the company, but its primary task is marketing. It's proof, even in these most distressingly modern of times, that patronage works.
Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet UK reported from Cambridge.
FIGHT!
[CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted.]
Interesting facts: There was word for DOS in 1983, Macintosh 1984, and later Windows 1989. Many attribute the GUI to mac (for which IMO windows has always been a poor imitator) The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were partially influenced by Xerox PARC but I did not know that concepts and ideas for Microsoft Word were brought from Bravo, the original GUI word processor developed at Xerox PARC. Although a few years late analyzing the Xerox device, Microsoft built quite an empire. Apple agreed to sell options to Xerox (What no stock?) in exchange for the information exchange. No facts discovered if Microsoft ever really gave anything back to Xerox. (Wikipedia)
I just searched wikipedia for Microsoft Research and saw countless projects from MSR that are very real, and not at all status related. For example:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Search_Maps
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitVault
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartok_(computer_science)
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project
The list was actually so much longer. These are just some things I picked at random. Remember -- MS is in this business for the long haul. Some things will reap immediate benefits and some things will be in incubation for maybe a decade before their goals are realized. Either way -- you cannot seriously make the claim that MS is using it's research division to get a tax break.
it's doing it right that matters more ! eg-: iPhone
The iPhone?!?!?! Done right the first time?!?!?!
no one's questioning the differences
Of cause Microsoft like most companies is not afraid of a but unhanded tactics to bring down prices of the stuff they want or force those people to sell
Microsoft Fanboy: Apple sucks so bad and I've never had any problem with Vista blah blah blah.
Linux Fanboy: Why do people use Apple or Windows when Linux is clearly superior blah blah blah.
Okay guys, I took care of everything. We can just skip the bashing now.
yeah especially if they come up crooked products like Windows Vista, Zune etc... but then if a company has a corpulent, uneducated & uncouth, uglee monkey at the helm, not surprising, is it?
to paraphrase an old saying: like Ceo, like customers :-)
The point in tech research if you can afford it is that you never know what the next big / important thing might be. If you don't have your hands in the experimental pie then you will always be lagging behind when new technologies become critical; not a position any company wants to be in.
You might want to do some research on what products the labs have researched and influenced before blithely assuming that the research is pointless just because it doesn't make it mainstream with the same name.
You are completely missing the points, and the points are two:
1- Serendipity. Researching the frontiers of your market will lead you into unexpected places and in turn result in entirely new products and new markets. You have to then wisely choose which of those to pursue. The product of good R&D will always be useful to *somebody*. If you have no use for it, find somebody who will or they will take it away from you. The modern PC industry and all of Apple owes its existence to the sheer incompetence of Xerox management who looked at the stuff coming out of PARC and ignored everything that didn't fit their existing product lines. They didn't use it and they didn't monetize it. In the end, it was appropriated by others. Microsoft has at least learned that lesson. If you look at their IP management they are aggressively licensing out or even outright selling those technologies that they don't see fitting their future direction. Even negative answers have value.
2- Relevance. Research into fundamentals provides insights into the underlying principles upon which your products are built. Modern software companies are no longer garage operations cranking out code almost at random; a company like Microsoft can and does spend significant effort exploring mathematics, physics, ergonomics, optics, human perception, etc, because all those are *relevant* to their business. Look at the effort going into natural language, semantics, vision systems, etc at MS Research and you can see where the industry and future products are going. Just think of their Surface computing intitiatives; where Apple and the other companies are working on touch, MS is working on vision and remote gesture detection. Which makes sense; we live in a 3D environment so one can reasonably expect advanced computers to be able to deal with a similar environment. Touch is fine for today; remote sensing is essential for tomorrow. Just because it doesn't help bottom line this particular quarter doesn't mean R&D isn't relevant. And just because you don't see the relevance, doesn't mean its not there. It might actually pay to read some of those published papers, you know...
There is a difference between good R&D and bad R&D.
Everybody in the business understands that sandboxes are a form of bad R&D; throwing money at academics to go and play without expecting any return ever is bad.
But so is incremental product R&D; spending zillions of person hours looking to cut a few pennies off a motherboard design for last years STB is just one (sadly all too common) way that companies waste R&D by focusing on the present instead of the future.
Good R&D needs to wander afield but always with an eye to the mission. Microsoft has not always done good R&D but at least their errors were the right kind; they were wandering too far afield rather than sticking too close to their knitting as Mr Goodwins seems to advocate.
And, no, R&D, is not just PR.
Not even bad R&D is that useless.
Unfortunately, Mr Goodwins perception of what R&D is about is actually a very common one these days.
One he seems to share with US President Obama who seems to think that NASA, the country's premiere Engineering R&D organization is just a PR exercise. When setting up his administration last fall, he built his transition teams around mission-specific experts; for DOE he put a physicist in charge, for DOJ, a lawyer, for Treasury, a banker. For NASA? A PR flack...
So, Mr Goodwins you are not alone in your misperceptions.
But just like him, you are way way off base.
Might want to talk to a few engineers and researchers next time, sir.
The fact that PARC didn't figure out how to commercialize their innovations doesn't mean their researchers weren't brilliant.
I just think of the major and minor changes in the last 15 years and I can't put my finger on where MSFT participated. You can read the papers from the Google leads and see how it translated into their work; you can participate in massive social networks like facebooks; virtualization is huge; increased graphics capabilities from NVidia, etc.. I just can't put my finger on the things MSFT research has produced.
In early 2000's, Microsoft Research created Wallop - social networking site with a focus on user interactions (very much like Facebook). Here is more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallop. MS management didn't see much future and sold the idea off.
Of course, any similarity to PARC is completely accidential...
- by STS May 12, 2009 1:19 PM PDT
- Let's face it, M$ does basic research for one basic reason. Like them or not (I don't particularly care for their general business practices), they have gotten sued so many times that they have taken a research/patent carpet bomb approach to research to protect themselves against infringement suits.
- Reply to this comment
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(33 Comments)They are "attacking" all areas so that if anyone sues them, there are at least semi-credible counter claims that can be made so the suits can generally be resolved by patent cross-licensing, eliminating the need for an extended court battle and potential mega award.
AND they might actually get something that can (eventually) generate a competitive advantage.
Scott