Spending money on research is always good, Microsoft Research has always had a lot of good ideas and generated some truly amazing prototypes and research papers. It's a good thing for the community in general the have people working on this stuff but it's not necessarily a good business investment for MS if they can't leverage the work into viable products.

Many companies like to fund R&D divisions as a means to attract the best minds from the academic community in the hopes that they will benefit from their talent in some way. It's often not directed work but more of a recruitment tool. The best professors bring with them the best students and many of those students end up working on products not just research.

However, in my time at Microsoft I worked with the research team on a couple of occasions trying leverage their ideas into real products with little success. We would send them some interesting problems (in one case we asked them to spend some time on snow accumulation algorithms for a snowboarding game) and they would disappear for months and return with a cool demo that was impressive but usually failed to meet the given criteria that allowed it to be used in a shipping product. e.g. speed, memory efficiency, data size requirements etc.