Microsoft Research Fights Critics 361
coondoggie writes to tell us Network World is taking a look at why Microsoft Research has to fight so hard against critics. From the article: "When the word 'innovation' is tossed about many may look down their nose at the company sitting on top of the high-tech industry — Microsoft. [...] Microsoft Research incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States."
deservedly (Score:5, Interesting)
If Microsoft were less predatory and less a bully in business maybe the rest of the world would stop looking down their noses at Microsoft's "research". As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.
I welcome research from any company. I'm guessing I've probably used what amounts to "innovation" from Microsoft, derivative of work from their labs.
Unfortunately for Microsoft (but true to their character) they have tools for mouthpieces like Ballmer. Microsoft inks a deal in what could only be viewed with raised eyebrows, and Ballmer punctuates that with "they're infringing our IP anyway...". As long as Microsoft continues to be so hostile to the world in general, they get what they sow.
Their research may be golden, but it's ill-gotten gains, the world thinks so, and the world is probably right. The fact that Microsoft has such a corner on every market that they can hire 25% of the Computer Science PhD candidates only adds fuel to the fires of suspicion.
In the interim, it's a shame Bell Labs has gone from world leader to nothing... budget cuts, etc. (Lucent)... there was some real research there, and lots of it was shared with the world.
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But will M$FT listen to a damn thing they have to say?
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this is the problem. i dont know how many of you ahve worked with CS doctorates, but they are some of the most obtuse people i know, and dont generally have any idea what it is the average person wants or needs. (which, imho is what drives this industry)
contrast this with apple, who employ top knotch designers to come up with the ideas, and then hire the big brains to implement it.
a good example might be apple's new 't
Re:deservedly (Score:5, Insightful)
As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.
Or more to the point, my complaint with Microsoft over the last few years is that they seem to have been spending more money on figuring out how to restrict my use of their products, and not very much money on figuring out how to make my life easier.
Now, maybe it's just me, personally, but I'm a home user and an IT professional. I use computers a lot for various things, and Windows seems to be getting harder to deal with. If I have to call Microsoft over another activation problem, I'm going to want to kill someone.... actually the truth is I've past that point a while ago.
Maybe it's just because Microsoft is servicing someone other than me. Maybe there's someone out there who's pleased as punch at the changes in Vista and Office 2007. I honestly think MS hit their peak in 2000, and things have just gotten more frustrating since then. Keep It Simple, Stupid. My needs aren't that unusual or complicated, but Microsoft doesn't seem to be making a lot of headway. Security. Stability. Easy imaging. Effective backups. Compatibility and interoperability. The ability to manage the ever-increasing mail stores. Transparency into what the computer is actually doing so that it can be manipulated more easily for any purpose.
For christ's sake, if you're going to pay so much for "innovation", try to tackle some of the fundamental problems with modern computing, instead of gimmicky wireless sharing for MP3 players, new copy-protection schemes, and snazzy graphics for FreeCell.
Re:deservedly (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft research does try to tackle such problems, the dilemma is that their work, as far as I can tell, seems to get ignored when it comes to product development and marketing. What fundamental problems in modern computing is Microsoft research trying to tackle? How about programming concurrent software. Traditionally this is hard, and error prone. What we need is a model of concurrency, and a programming language to support it, that makes programming concurrent systems easy, and make reasoning about it easy. Microsoft is working in that area with C-omega [microsoft.com] and extension of C# with a better concurrency system. See the tutorials [microsoft.com] to get an idea of how it works. It's not unique, there are other concurrency oriented languages out there like Occam, AliceML, Oz etc. that handle concurrency well, and other concurrency language extensions, like SCOOP for Eiffel, and JCSP for Java, that seek to add better concurrency models to existing languages. Still C-omea is its own tangent, and has interesting ideas (as do the other similar projects and other languages).
What about the issue of maintainability and quality assurance in software? Certainly that's at the heart of a deep problem, and there are no easy answers. There are things you can do to make better quality assurance easier however. Microsoft's effort on that front is Spec# [microsoft.com] which adds design by Contract to C# and provides extended static checking (using the Simplify theorem prover) to provide static verification of contracts where possible. This provides another layer of quality assurance, and (by integrating the static checking into Visual Studio) automates most of the work, meaning it requires little extra effort from programmers. Again this is not unique, there's Eiffel which has had DbC but no static verification for a very long time, and there's JML and ESC/Java2 which provides DbC (via annotations in comments) and extended static checking (again using the Simplify theorem prover) for Java - you can even get Eclipse plugins to integrate it into your IDE. Still Spec# is going it's own way (and has much better integration directly into the language than JML, which remains as comments) and has interesting ideas of its own.
The problem is not that Microsoft research isn't doing anything interesting, it's that projects like this tend to get buried, or ignored, or simply have a few ideas shifted into existing products. Things like Spec# offer sufficient gains that Microsoft's marketing department really ought to be crowing about it as a major upcoming feature, and serious effort to properly polish it as a product and get it into C# and VisualStudio should be underway. Instead it remains a page tucked away on MS research with little or nothing said about it.
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If you want a feature-rich language supporting metaprogramming and functional programming style - then look at http://nemerle.org/Main_Page [nemerle.org] (I hope nobody from RSDN reads this...).
Spec# is yet-another-theorem-prover built in in language. NASA did this for Java years ago and I've read that a similar approach was used with Lisp back in 70-s.
I don't see much real innovations from MS Research. It seems that they just try to adapt
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Likewise Spec# borrows ideas (honestly, what development does
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Another problem that I have with it is the lack of any object model, or any decent tutorial.
It does do concurrency well, but that, by itself, isn't sufficient. (I just checked it out for a couple of days recently. Not long enough to really know the language, but long enough to get a high-level feel of it.)
One nice thing about Erlang is it's good connection to a database. (We
deservedly similies (Score:2, Funny)
Microsoft Research is to research what AC's are to slashdot. Burned, buried, and ignored with a few modded up.
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Microsoft research does try to tackle such problems, the dilemma is that their work, as far as I can tell, seems to get ignored when it comes to product development and marketing. What fundamental problems in modern computing is Microsoft research trying to tackle?
All that stuff is great, but if you can't create basic functionality that is simple and robust, sophisticated new developments are pretty useless. That is in fact, Microsoft's ongoing problem-- they're so busy working on the future that they d
Re:deservedly (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I see Microsoft research as another expression of their business model. Then again, Bell Labs was created to protect AT&T's monopoly, so why should MS be any different?
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The resignation that he couldn't do this alone slowly zipped its way through his meat-grid. He needed help. And fast.
His mind made
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Microsoft Marketing, the RIAA, and the MPAA.
Next question?
Re:deservedly (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I as a business owner or shareholder spend my money to do a task whose result isn't a benefit to the business, but to some other company from whom I bought a product? In other words, when a business pays someone to solve an "activation" problem, they have paid someone to insure that Microsoft was paid. The business receives no benefit, but they are out the money anyway.
When Microsoft pours money into research on how to develop technologies that seek to avoid theft of their product, that is fine until part of their solution increases the cost of ownership. When Microsoft pours money into "securing digital rights", that's fine until part of their solution increases the cost of access to content.
Microsoft and others are struggling to survive in a future where computers have nearly unlimited disk space, increasing numbers of processors, vast memory spaces, and high bandwidth to other computers. Very soon we should be able to run multiple operating systems on a single computer at the same time. Running on virtual machines will be the norm, if for no other reason than to allow applications the freedom they need to run and not step on each other or get killed by viruses and compromised by spyware.
Everyone would be impressed if Microsoft was embracing this future and working to leverage all this power for the sake of the user. Instead, Microsoft appears to be working late into the night doing everything they can to insure each day dawns according to the same old paradigms that made them billions in the past.
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Re:deservedly (Score:4, Funny)
There are other operating systems, you know.....
I know of at least 2 of them that don't have activation problems at all.
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What makes you think the don't? Try reading any major peer-reviewed computer science journal, or conference proceedings, and you'll find people from MS Research well represented.
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Hey now! Animated paperclips don't invent themselves.
Re:deservedly (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately for Microsoft (but true to their character) they have tools for mouthpieces like Ballmer. Microsoft inks a deal in what could only be viewed with raised eyebrows, and Ballmer punctuates that with "they're infringing our IP anyway...". As long as Microsoft continues to be so hostile to the world in general, they get what they sow.
Nobody (or at least most people) argues that Microsoft doesn't come up with original ideas. Their research arm has a ton of truly brilliant people. I mean, Leslie Lamport and Tony Hoare work there. The problem is not that Microsoft can't come up with some innovative stuff. The problem is in how they translate it from their research side to their implementation and then marketing, which is usually pretty lousy.
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Really? In every single article posted here about MS products (especially Vista and IE7) you'll see literally dozens of comments arguing exactly that. I'm no MS fanboi, but the FUD gets a little tiresome - we're supposed to be above that...
Re:deservedly (Score:4, Interesting)
The other problem -tech transfer- is the enemy of all R&D labs, and of academia too. There's a lot of good ideas out there, that don't make it out into a world that has the x86 as the primary CPU, A DOS derivative and a Unix derivative as the choices of OS, and C/C++ as the primary programming languages.
FWIW, I work in a corporate R&D lab in the UK, and getting anything taken up is always a miracle to be celebrated. Except when it takes so long to come to market that they shouldnt have bothered. This is why open source is so much better as a way of doing tech transfer. If you have something good, a patch, a test and the ability to argue your case, it can be in the code tree in a week, and in people's hands the next day, in mainstream distros within a month or two.
Whereas MS Research? Vista took 5 years. Every new idea in the last three of those years will have been postponed to its successor. So the lag between an idea and product is 3-5 years, compared to 3-5 weeks.
-steve
Re:deservedly (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be too quick to lionize Bell Labs, as they were the research arm of The Phone Company (AT&T), which itself was the object of scorn for decades for abusing their position of being the only game in town. Just as you argue that Micros~1's research are "ill-gotten gains" from their predatory business practices, one could also level the same argument against the Bell Labs of 40 years ago.
Don't misunderstand; I am in no way a Micros~1 apologist, and would richly enjoy watching the company collapse under its own hubris and technical incompetence. It's simply that, if you're going to slam the company, you need to pick your comparisons more carefully.
Schwab
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Another comparable is IBM. Yes they were the monopolist villains of their time. But, they also invented things such as RISC and Relational Databases.
Micro$oft is spending a fortune and coming up with scraps and baubles
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OTOH, can anyone say that MS has an equivalent organization? If so, they definitely hide it.
Re:deservedly (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly you know very little about what you're talking about, but as your comment is in perfect accordance with the dominant groupthink it gets modded up anyway. MSR is actually less restrictive than an average PhD program, you can work on basically anything you want, which is one of the reasons PhDs find it so appealling. It is more or less independent from the rest of MS, and the researchers are certainly not driven by a desire to find "yet another way to dominate". Yet this, of course, is precisely also the reason for the difficulty they are having with technology transfer.
It's one thing to look down on MS because of what they bring to market, and quite another to look down on the great work done in MSR, much of which is free to download and use [microsoft.com] by anyone. If you want to deride professionals doing great work by putting scare quotes around "research" (really, don't you think that's a little much?), do it for a better reason than your kneejerk conflation of what MSR is doing and MS' business practices.
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Umm.. should Microsoft be researching ways to help its competition take it over? Of course MS is going to be looking for the next killer 'thing' (app, console, music player, etc.) to lead the market. That's the beauty of a market - companies have incentives to do things which make the company stronger.
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Such as keeping talented people from working for the competition.
Now they can be safely tasked to researching Clippy NT (New Technology, yay!)
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I'm no fan of Ma Bell, but don't tar Bell Labs with that brush.
Admittedly, their free-flowing research money derived as much from the fact that the FCC counted the Labs into the cost basis for AT&T's profits (in other words, they made a profit on every dollar spent). That said, however, they did have a nearly blank check to do Really Amazingly Cool Research without Corporate demanding that it all pay off in the
Not a Huge Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Large companies shouldn't hire these professions just to "push the envelope." Instead, I would hope that all companies diversified as their employee numbers grow. I work in a large IT company and have witnessed the above professions working effectively--especially in the R&D department.
One of the areas of studies the gets some of the most criticism from me. But you know what? When it comes to performing experiments on how people think and react to stimuli, psychologists are pretty damn good at it since all their data has been collected empirically from subjects. And who uses the code and devices we make in the end? Humans. And who better to tell you what the effects will be after a human has used your product for hours on end? You know, I've often wondered how many psychologists Blizzard employs because I can play that game for long periods of time with little or no fatigue on my eyes/brain.
As software becomes more and more decentralized and internet based, communities form around it. Communities identify themselves by it. For instance, I am part of the Slashdot community by merely posting on it. Think about how many sociologists that MySpace must employ to predict/track or protect people from social deviance. How do you handle that? How do you address that? Not really an engineer's department.
Now that's a word I hear thrown around a lot and abused to mean many things. But most importantly, it's the study of diverse kinds of people. If you're an international company, you need anthropologists to view your projects and make sure that you aren't inadvertently calling your product or displaying something that may limit your market or create bad press. Engineers focus on one type of person when they make their product and so you need people to make sure that it is still marketable to the world.
Most likely hired for the sheer fact that baby boomers are getting old. Huge market for healthcare. If you can make anything related to it and sell it, you're in the money for the coming years. I may be a horrible monster for saying this but things like Alzheimer's Disease are multi-billion dollar industries based on treatments. Gene therapy and computational techniques in gene sequencing just make the field all that more lucrative.
On top of that, you need to think of the disabled using your product and be conscious of their disabilities. Also, what medical problems might be associated with your product or how can you make it easier on the end user. You don't want a million lawsuits if I'm losing my eye sight or getting arthritis by playing WoW, do you?
Come on people, this is the R&D of the largest software company in the world. I'm shocked that I'm not more shocked on what they're up to.
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Plus than 99% of my rants on things I hate can be rolled into one as I curse Tomsoft Microcruise and all his horrible religiomonopoliness. I want my open source alcoholism back, damnit!
Are they really that interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
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And what would be wrong with any of those options for a PhD student?
Ph.D. student: MS for internship, then real job (Score:2, Interesting)
First, nobody finishes a Ph.D then wants to work at MS in order to find an interesting career. New grads or interns go there to make some money, and hope to move on soon. The respect for MS from IT-aware people is
Re:Are they really that interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a close friend who joined Microsoft Research last year after his PhD (which included interning there). He also had an offer from Google and a couple of hedge funds. His reason for taking MSR was that Microsoft, for all it's image does actually allow the MSR guys to pretty much do what they want to explore instead of forcing a direction driven by a profit making application of that work. This results in much research not ending up in products (so you don't see it), but doesn't stifle the people working there. This came as quite a surprise to me but when I look at some of the papers the groups in MSR have published, I wonder how far from the truth that is.
oh and BTW, they were paying a good 0.6x higher than Google so that would account for some of those PhDs.
Well, perhaps it might be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, they've played around with things a bit - changed the interface here and there, come up with slight tweaks, But at the end of the day, it's not the tweaks that get recognised as innovation; it's the whole new products.
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Like what? Can you name even one thing that they've incorporated which would require a giant research department? I haven't seen a single thing in any of their products that wasn't either obvious or copied from a competitor.
Nah it's just Microsoft so lets blindly bash them
It's not blind bashing when their comments have substance to them, unlike yours.
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For example: Plug and Play might not work as it was intended, but at least now you can get a system that will work. I can add or remove a hard drive or a video
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How about putting the whole damn platform together in a useable package? Apple has done it to a very limited extent (missing lots of server pieces), but nobody else has done it.
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If the only complaint you have against NTFS is fragmentation, then you're an idiot who doesn't know a thing about filesystems.
Think about the
"research" (Score:4, Insightful)
Does that include Zune? The Microsoft music service? How much research did it take to come up with 'We need to make our own iPod and music service'?
Flame On...
Re:"research" (Score:5, Informative)
MSR's the group that came up with SLAM [microsoft.com], which is now incorporated into the Windows driver framework. It's resulted in (over the last 5 years) two POPL papers (one of the two top-tiered programming language conferences), a PLDI paper (the other of the two), a PASTE paper, a TOPLAS paper, three TACAS papers, three CAV papers, a few workshop papers, and a spinoff project at UC Berkeley called BLAST which is doing things very similar to SLAM. (They've had their own fair share of papers, and probably a doctoral thesis or two, on it.)
MSR's the group that wrote Singularity, an experimental OS written in C#, that has an ASPLOS paper, two EuroSys papers (one of which got the best paper award), and three workshop papers.
MSR's the group that wrote Vulcan, a binary rewriter that allowed them to create a program that records the execution trace of another program and play it back later. This is useful in, for instance, temporal debugging. (Think the Omnicient Debugger for Java, except made to work on any program because it operates on binaries. Except that MSR developed two other applications for the recorded traces.) This, and other projects that MSR has done with Vulcan, have resulted in a number of other papers.
Say what you like about MS in general, but MSR publishes more good research than many (probably even most) university CS depts.
Published Research (Score:2)
In academia, publications are your metric of success. In industry, its your ability to generate an ROI by improving the company's profits.
Xerox PARC was a failure to xerox. Not to Canon, HP and adobe (laser printing and PDF), not to apple, MS or the rest of the world that uses GUIs. But it was to Xerox. I dont know if MSR has repaid their investment yet. Frankly, at the estimated $10B that vista c
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That's true innovation...
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what critics? (Score:5, Informative)
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To rehash what you said, only "bandwagon riders" and fools hate microsoft for their intelligence...they hate them for their buisness practices. Regardless of your opinion of them, you cannot deny that they are highly successful in their goals.
***awaits some stupid comparison to Hitler***
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How about if I steal your car, and donate the spare tire to Goodwill? Does that make it ok?
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(Sorry, I'm sorta cynical towards
Re:what critics? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, tobacco and fast-food companies are making lots of money, too, but that doesn't mean that their products are good or that most of their employees are smart. Big businesses succeed because of a small number of ruthless and smart business and marketing people at the top; the rest of the employees are little more than hamburger flippers, at Microsoft as much as at MacDonalds. Companies where the technical skill of employees can make a difference are small and medium companies, as well as startups.
MS research (Score:2, Informative)
* Singularity OS
* Socio-Digital systems
* Digital geographics
* Natural Language Processing
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This makes the big assumption that what they are patenting is truely a new idea. If you look at their patents you will see that most of them entail ideas that have been prior-art for years. The patent office is not doing due diligence during the investigation process because they do not have the expertise. But it doesn't matter because the MS warchest is so deep they can bankrupt just about any competitor by filing frivilous patent violation laws
Wow, 21%...? (Score:2)
Where are the results? (Score:2, Insightful)
Makes their
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That's because, unlike the old Bell Labs nor Google, Microsoft doesn't really capitalize from its research. Look at the research with Singularity [microsoft.com], for example. As a future computer science researcher (I'm just a sophomore in college now), I would love to get my hands on a system like this. Finally something new that isn't based off of nearly 40 years of Unix. The goals are quite noble and innovative, and I'm glad that Microsoft is doing systems research, something that seems to have been neglected in co
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When Bell Labs invented the transistor, it wasn't doing it just to do something interesting to some researchers. Bell used this new technology, and the transistor went on to utterly revolutionize the world.
Making up a new OS and keeping it locked away in a research lab isn't useful; it's a colossal waste of time. It doesn't matter how good it is if you're not going to do anything wit
Re:Where are the results? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention there would be an absolutely massive paradigm shift involved in moving from Win32/64 to a platform like Singularity...
Re:Where are the results? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh, do you even *know* what the hell you are talking about? Maybe you should try looking at some of the ACM SIG* or IEEE publications in the various fields related to CS.
MSR produces some of the best CS research in the world. Just because their work does not percolate down to the products and services teams at MS does not make MSR lack any innovation.
In fact, if you look into most areas, MSR has made some very cutting edge and valuable contributions.
Maybe you should have a look at the list of publications they have put out since 2000 [microsoft.com].
Do not confuse research with development. Then again, given that this is Slashdot, blind and ignorant Microsoft bashing is welcome, even if the person bashing it has absolutely no clue whatsoever.
Nice.
So msft just does pointless research? (Score:5, Insightful)
So msft spends gobs of money, hiring huge numbers of researchers to do all kinds of research. Msft invents all kinds of stuff. Then msft just throws all of that away, and steals ideas from other companies?
Makes perfect sense to me.
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Really? [google.com] Or are you just talking out of your ass?
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MSR's lack of product development is interesting and, but it doesn't app
Maybe a lot of people (Score:2)
That alone overshadows everything else they do, including stuff that may actually be innovative.
Money Can't Buy Brains. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not knocking the individuals working for Microsoft, it's just that there comes a point in the lifespan of a company where it's past its prime. Getting a truly 'new' product far enough to the front is a gargantuan task, that ends up requiring patents and huge investment because the entire process is so slow.
Let's just compare Apple and MS here for a second. Apple pulls stuff into the mainstream that's pretty new once in a while. They seem to enjoy it. It's been really profitable. But some of the stuff they do is so new that noone can really catch up until it's too late. (see: iPod, good UI, 'stylish' design)
BR Somehow, Apple listens to new ideas, where Microsoft attempts to implement old ones and takes flack for never getting it exactly right. One wonders where this cultural issue is in M$, and what makes the difference between the two. But that's only an academic question.
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I'm not knocking the individuals working for Microsoft, it's just that there comes a point in the lifespan of a company where it's past its prime?
I think this statement is a little misleading, depending on what you mean by "its prime". Possibly, there comes a point in the life-span of a company where it's original business model no longer works, or when it becomes too bloated. Lots of things happen, but under good management, a company can shift, retool, and stay successful. Nintendo didn't always make
they *do* cool stuff: quantum computing anyone? (Score:2)
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Bling bling! (Score:2)
Additionally, you need smart people throughout the company. Xerox PARC had a lot of brains and made world-changing products decades ago but it didn't do them
Does published commercial research suck? (Score:2)
I don't know what leads to this trend, but I'm pretty sure it's there and I now cringe when I have to read a paper from corporate authors. THAT'S one reaso
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bad papers suck (Score:2)
Oh, that's so unfair. Go look at this little bunny I wrote last year [hp.com], pointing out the entire Web Service SOAP stack and its belief in seamless mapping between Java/C# and XML was a load of fundamentally unachievable bollocks.
When I was at the IEEE conf presenting it (and getting best paper, BTW), I had to put up with three days of academics stuck in the depths of their little web service, none of whom seemed to step back and notice that what they basing their work on was junk. Instead they were using A
Billions and Billions for what??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it (Score:2)
what a waste of money (Score:2, Troll)
Or maybe MSR are scamming microsoft as much as microsoft marketers are scamming the world.
A few random MSR scams:
- "hey Wordperfect are making lots of money selling a word processor, let's make our own."
- "hey, over 50% of Sony's global profits are from a games console. let's make our own."
- "hey Apple came up with this fancy MOV movie container format. let's make our own."
- "hey Apple
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usable and enjoyable for whom? the Geek? or the non-technical end user?
Microsoft won two innovation awards just last week (Score:4, Insightful)
I got this from a post to Scoble's blog last week:
Speaking of XNA (a framework allowing normal folk to make Windows and Xbox 360 games (without the need for a devkit), a great video of it was released last week at Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=261
The video shows coding, debugging, and deployment of Xbox 360 games using XNA. Although XNA uses C# managed code, one of the sample games shown in the video, XNA Racer, runs at 1080p 30fps with 2x antialiasing.
It's a very cool video. Beyond anything you'd see from Apple, Google, et al.
The notion that Microsoft does no innovation is nonsense.
Mach OS Team... remember them? (Score:2)
The boy who cried "Innovation" (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Buying the second or third ranked player in a market segment.
2. Rebranding it.
3. Throwing their advertising dollars behind it.
4. Calling it "Innovation."
Worse is when they steal other's ideas and call it "Innovation." How many time have they been sued?
I hope they are on the path to reform, but it will take a significant pattern of honest behavour before I believe what they say.
I'm certainly no expert with private enterprise, (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
XBox 360 != innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
How is the Xbox 360 innovative? It's a machine that was designed for market penetration. There's nothing new or innovative whatsoever.
Compare that to the Wii with it's innovative controller, and the PS3 with it's innovative architecture and cutting-edge technology.
We should boycott these "innovations" until they *really* produce something innovative.
Toss this... (Score:2)
Not all innovations or innovators are good or benevolent.
Perhaps Micro$oft can research this...
It's against their nature (Score:2)
Microsoft Research meets Microsoft Marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft Research! More computer science papers come out of us than from the top universities! We present them at numerous prestigious conferences around the world!
Now, in partnership with Microsoft Marketing, we are proud to announce... Research4All!
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--Rob
Numbers Don't Add Up (Score:4, Informative)
> having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including
> 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone,
> which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD
> candidates in the United States."
http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may06/taulbee.htm
suggests around 1200 CS PhDs *awarded* in 2004-2005 in the USA and Canada. The number for the USA alone may be lower than this, but it might also be higher since 20% of departments surveyed did not respond. But assuming 1200/year is close to the mark, the number of "computer science PhD candidates in the United States" must be several times that, since a PhD takes several years and furthermore a lot of PhD students never complete their degree. I think an average of five years of studentship per PhD awarded would be a reasonably conservative estimate; then the 21% number quoted should be more like 4%.
When the Functional Programming Revolution hits... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft is an 800-pound gorilla, but do NOT knock their research arm. Whatever it may have been in the past, these days there are definitely people doing interesting stuff at the very cutting edge of computing
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LoB
Thanks. I'll hide my other shirt... (Score:3, Funny)
Relax people, they're (bad) jokes!
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No one with a grasp of the gaming market considers XBox to be a major innovation of any sort. It's a copy of what came before, from a company that has to have its nose in everything. That's the only reason Microsoft had someone else create the XBox (don't believe for a second that Microsoft actually designed and built it).
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They're one of the most recognized research lab in the CS world, with plenty of awards and publicly available papers proving it.
Maybe next time you should do some research before talking about something...