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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

When I was at IBM research last century, we thought MS research was doing awesome things, but unable to get products out. There appeared to be some fear that MS would start producing stuff from their research. (MS and IBM were competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena)

I hope the New England R&D (NERD) which has been very generous with allowing software groups to use their space to meet continues to do so.

Short sited and a sad day.

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> (MS and IBM were competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena)

If IBM was worried about Microsoft Outlook competing with Lotus Notes, whatever Microsoft Research was working on was surely not even worth worrying about compared to the fact that IBM's product was Lotus Notes.

They only axed Silicon Valley research. Microsoft Research is still strong, but in Redmond, Israel and other locations. The Microsoft executive team fully recognizes that research is key to their future success.

What success has come from MSR? MSR always seemed like a charity operation.

When I read about the immense amount of money that has reportedly gone into research at companies like Microsoft, billions of dollars, and seen very little ever come of it, I can't help but think maybe they would have been better of just making it a venture capital fund. I don't think R&D departments have the incentive entrepreneurs have in actually making research useful. Google X stands out as different, and I think that's because Google seems to be using it for marketing as much as research. We've yet to see any game changers come out of there, unless you think Google Glass was a success. The self-driving automobiles are interesting and will probably lead to something, and the air drones too. It's probably not all a wash.

The dollar figures for "R&D" are really deceiving. Don't forget the "D" stand for development.

For a company the size of Microsoft, who has 130k employees, it's not unrealistic to imagine 40k employees are developers and/or product management.

At an average fully loaded cost of $150k per developer x 40k developers = $6 Billion.

So all the cost to just maintain their EXISTING product set, in this illustration, might be $6B ... none of which is "research"

The conspiracy theory I heard is that MS is playing a long game to go private.

Whenever their stock starts to go up; they pump a lot into R&D which makes them less attractive to investors stabilizing or lowering their stock price while not devaluing the company.

I don't know enough about stock manipulating to evaluate these statements, but I found them interesting when first told to me.

Where were some things @ MS research (back then) that stood out as awesome or memorable to you?

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