To Microsoft, Basic Research Is Good Insurance | Hacker News Reader

To Microsoft, Basic Research Is Good Insurance

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

14 pointsnewacc13 comments

Too bad this is such a short and content-less article. I was hoping for more insights into how MS manages to run the best basic research lab in computer science in the world, while being hopelessly clueless in their corporate life.

Are you talking about the same company? As in, the most successful, largest IT company in the world?

That just makes the story even more amazing: that they have so much size, money, and power in the marketplace - and leading research at their fingertips - yet the research doesn't seem to be translating into compelling products. I've long been teased by the promise of Intentional Programming, Singularity, or Volta - but nothing ever emerges that advances the state of the art.

The largest technology company in the world is Hewlett Packard. The largest software company in the world is IBM. Clearly that proves IBM never did anything "hopelessly clueless" then, right?

Microsoft sells more software than IBM.

http://www.softwaretop100.org/list2009.php

(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft Research, since about two weeks ago.) You might enjoy reading this article from Roy Levin, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley: http://bit.ly/1NEc8f

I found the axes he laid out at the beginning of the article to be an interesting way to think about different research jobs. The rest of the article is about the choices made by MSR generally and MSR Silicon Valley in particular along those axes.

Please don't use bit.ly links. There's no space limitation here and it will give us all a better idea of where we are about to go.

Thanks for explaining this. Here is the unshortened link: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/roylevin/osrresea...

I will use unshortened links in the future.

:) Thank you. Good link.

Also, from the Bing mention, buying Powerset != basic research. Yes, other stuff probably went into Bing, but that spade's a spade.

It seems like a bunch of Microsoft employees must've found HN recently. There's been a huge surge in pro-MS articles that are devoid of hacker content.

We're much too shy for that. And I doubt the marketing dept reads this site.

Ah; sorry. My posted wasn't pointed at you. I didn't mean technical MS employees ..

I meant the marketing/propaganda folks, who can certainly be counted upon to attempt to sway popular opinion in Microsoft's favor through targeted posting on a popular, high-traffic forum with educated readership.

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