Microsoft R&D hits all-time high, meaning what?
Microsoft's research-and-development spending hit a record high in 2008, according to its most recent annual report. At the same time, the company's R&D spending relative to employee head count has gone down.
Not that it matters. For all Microsoft's spending on the future, it continues to focus its business on guarding the past. Yes, it builds cool (but useful?) things like the Sphere, but when was the last time you saw Office or Windows significantly improved by that R&D spending?
In Microsoft's defense, perhaps we've tapped out the desktop software metaphor, and there's simply not much it can do there (beyond building SharePoint and the next tier of lock-in services to guard its cash cow product lines). Unfortunately, this "defense" is also my biggest critique of Microsoft: its future is so tied up in protecting its past that it's unlikely to ever unleash true innovations from the labs that could destabilize the desktop.
If you believe, as I do, that there's a bright future beyond the traditional desktop, it's hard to get excited about Microsoft's R&D spending, knowing that it's likely to lead to more of the same, with the occasional circus curiosity like Sphere.
Microsoft's R&D spending hit an all-time high in 2008.
(Credit: Todd Bishop)Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, has a product that competes with SharePoint.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Protecting the past is highly profitable, fairly easy considering the fragmented competition, and as shown by Apple- people are still really interested in what that box on their desk can do with a traditional operating system,
That being said, it's pretty obvious that MS is moving beyond the desktop - Game consoles, hand held devices, SYNC and other auto based products, cluster based computing, sphere and related products, OLPC-type machines, SaaS, and the cloud.
This isn't the big bad monolithic 1980s/1990s IBM, this is the company that helped bring that IBM crashing down. Totally different mindset.
I don't know what exactly they will do or how well of course, but given their free cash flow and market breathe, they don't have to be first, second, third, or the best to thrive and/or dominate.
That being said, there is a big push in MS to work on greater parallelism in code to really handle a large number of processing cores properly. Many people don't understand that you can't just throw more cores at an application and expect performance to improve unless its properly parallelized. Its also not very easy to parallelize operations that are ostensibly serial in nature. This means its actually a field rich with research potential and MS is putting a lot of money into it.
While you are mulling that over, consider this- even if MS never innovated anything, so what? This is not about art for the sake of art, or innovation for the sake of innovation. It's about $$; and that puts them right on target.
Contrary to popular belief, Apple did not invent the computer or the portable music player or the multi-function cell phone. They "copy" ideas just like any other company. The only thing is... it is not copying. Using a pre-existing idea to build a product is not a crime unless it is a direct violation of a patent or copyright. BASF used to have (maybe still does have) a very telling motto "BASF doesn't make alot of the products you use, we make the products you use BETTER".
I've been around enough to know that nothing I (or anyone else for that matter) say will make anyone stand up and go "hey, you know what, I am being a little foolish... perhaps there CAN exist a company that 'competes' with the company that I love and adore but isn't evil". Likewise, I highly doubt that all the people that will want to post a reply to this and tell me out stupid my ideas are and how much better Apple/Linux, etc. are than Windows will change my mind and make me give up the convenience and compatibility of Windows. Not likely. People are creatures of habit, we'll do as we do until we can't do anymore.
I think the uptick on investment in this department means that MS is throwing as much crap to the wall as they can to see what sticks.
After all, MS has shown 0 ability to understand that future of computing. For the past few years they have simply been following the trends without understanding why or how. I think this is their attempt to try and be relevant again.
CZR
- by foomonkey249702348 August 7, 2008 2:00 PM PDT
- What else is there in a software company other than R&D? Sales? It's not like there are big factories to keep up...
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