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Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, Microsoft Research and IBM Research, unlike Google Labs, do not operate with the clear intent of ever productizing their work. What they do there is much more similar to the work done in universities.

And if Microsoft Research is like IBM, then it's also only partly funded by the corporation, and regarded as a semi-separate entity. I think they see it more as a contribution to science and as a long-term investment rather than product research.

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You are right about Microsoft Research (MSR) but not about IBM Research. In fact, MSR is the only true academic-style research lab left in the world; all others either disbanded or became more product-focused. It will be interesting to see how long the MSR model survives. Will be great to hear the views of an MSRian on this.

I'm not on MSR directly, but I am part of a future research team at Microsoft. Internally things are interesting - you have the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want, but you have to justify it's usefulness one way or another. Microsoft is made up of thousands of tiny little teams that are mostly autonomous - each team has to prove that there's a reason for it to exist though. With research, especially things that will only come to fruition ten or twenty years out, it's very hard to directly measure it's impact. One of the things we end up doing is alternating between future and near reaching projects so that we can justify our existence with projects that are tangible in the present, but also contribute to future goals as well.

In a sense we are product focused as well, except our target market isn't consumers, but rather people up on high within microsoft. We have to sell our research to them one way or another, and it's often the research teams that have the best advertising sense about them that end up doing the best.

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.

Yeah, well, no one is saying MS and IBM are great companies business- or product-wise, but they should both be applauded for funding truly innovative research -- be it for philanthropic reasons or for some future profit. Fact is, as you say, no other company is doing this. Not Google; not Apple; and, sadly, not Oracle.

> it doesn't matter how cool the invention is if you have to eat the rest of their shit with it.

But it does matter, because even if MS doesn't pick it up -- or implement it well -- someone else might.

> even if MS doesn't pick it up -- or implement it well -- someone else might.

Unless there are potential patent problems.

I first saw a Microsoft Surface (table) presentation at their research facility in Boston. The next time that I went up there they were piloting the table at the Hilton as well. I feel like that they were definitely operating without the intent of monetizing it, but damn, I would love to see those tables at restaurants, etc.

I played with the surface for a bit at the NERD in Cambridge too. I found it slow, and unresponsive. It was, and still is a great proof of concept but i'm not sure the tech is ready to be a product yet.

I played a few words of scrabble on some version of the surface a few years ago (i think spring 2011), and it could handle 4 people using all ten fingers at once. when did you use the surface?

The first time was a couple of years ago and it was a demonstration with a Windows Mobile phone fanning out with contacts. This was given by a marketing type person, and could have been completely a sham.

The second time was about three years ago during St. Patrick's day at the Hilton. I was able to use most of the applications described above.

I remember testing one and it couldn't detect more than two fingers. There was some piano app and you couldn't play a chord with three notes.

That could easily have been a software limitation in that program rather than hardware limitation.

Yes, but keep in mind Microsoft Research is only the R in R&D, making up a small minority of the $9.6 Billion. Most of that money is counting the engineering resources in the product groups, such as Windows and Office.

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