Microsoft Accused of Squandering Billions On R&D 580
Julie188 writes "Even as Microsoft celebrates its 10,000th patent, angry shareholders are starting to speak out against what they say is the squandering of billions of dollars on pointless R&D projects. The 10,000th patent covers a technology that allows a device to associate data with objects placed on its surface, and is likely eventually to become part of the Surface table PC. But shareholders are fed up with the $8 billion annually spent. Said one, 'I believe Bill Gates is a charlatan because what he has said, implied, promised to shareholders and stakeholders and all of these visionary things that he mumbles and jumbles about and doesn't make reality of. MS is spending billions of dollars on R&D. Where is the return on investment?' In contrast, Apple had almost the same revenue gains as Microsoft while spending one-tenth as much."
Death march (Score:5, Insightful)
Since Mr. Gates owns so much of MS, I personally doubt this will happen, but if MS concedes and then begins to cut back on R&D, I'll start to believe those that say that the days of MS are numbered.
Stalemate. (Score:5, Insightful)
Budget (Score:2, Insightful)
Will this get Troll or Flamebait? (Score:1, Insightful)
They aren't investors (Score:5, Insightful)
Even as Microsoft celebrates its 10,000th patent, angry shareholders are starting to speak out against what they say is the squandering of billions of dollars on pointless R&D projects.
Investors know that sometimes things won't pay out. These are the whiny little 10%-return-no-risk assholes who sue when a CEO doesn't start layoffs ASAP to pump up the stock price.
Here's news for you: sometimes weird investments pay off in radically unforeseeable ways. If you're the kind of jackass who dismissed the idea because we already had vacuum tubes, then you're the same kind who thinks modern R&D is a waste of money.
As much as I dislove Microsoft, I'm glad they're doing this stuff. Apparently they understand the importance even if a few short term profit-takers are too stupid to see it.
The simple answer (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple answer is you can't "manage" or plan innovation. A reasonable plan would be to hire a bunch of hackers, preferably ones seen at work at 2 AM, give them each a private office and a $30,000 yearly budget for gadgetry, and a mandate to do something fun and maybe useful. And that's it.
Of course no manager would allow this, so that might explain the paucity of results.
Apple isn't even spending that (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of Apple's "R&D" is spent on "D"; there is very little actual research coming out of Apple, by any objective measure. Apple just takes other people's badly packaged good ideas and sticks them into shiny white plastic packages, writing patents along the way.
Unlike other big companies, Apple doesn't even give research grants to academia in any significant quantity (they just charge an arm and a leg for their machines).
If all high tech companies were as stingy as Apple, academia and computer science research would be in big trouble.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean, like say C# or .NET?
Screw your profit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like Microsoft now has its fair share of shareholders with such a short-sighted vision that they are only interested in short-term profit at the expense of long-term growth. As hundreds of companies have discovered... The "democratic" approach of shareholding has its drawbacks. O_o
MS Needs R&D (Score:5, Insightful)
MS is moving to the edge of bubble, they need to either realize that they are becoming the next IBM and begin to move away from the desktop market into server/solutions development; or begin to become more of a consumer electronics company, which would require creating "good" consumer electronics and be competitive in that market, not use it as a loss-leader to harm their competitors or further intrench their Windows position. Desktop computing in the past 3-4 years has offered very little that is groundbreaking for the average user, and the best-of-the best in '01 is still good enough for most people. PC manufacturers aren't seeing major growth, only sales in "back-to-school" periods where students become first time buyers rather than using mom & dads aging box, or replacement when existing boxes fail; which more and more consumers and companies are working to reduce.
In a strapped market, where people are much more willing part with hard earned dollars for 6 more inches on their screen with HD more than chips 400MHz faster (but feel slower on bloated software), MS needs to find a new market that they can win, and win big in; or they are going to see their share decreasing.
Re:Stalemate. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not against antitrust laws to simply be a large company. And it's not against antitrust laws for a large company to simply grow either.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:5, Insightful)
Even as Microsoft celebrates its 10,000th patent, angry shareholders are starting to speak out against what they say is the squandering of billions of dollars on pointless R&D projects.
Investors know that sometimes things won't pay out. These are the whiny little 10%-return-no-risk assholes who sue when a CEO doesn't start layoffs ASAP to pump up the stock price.
Here's news for you: sometimes weird investments pay off in radically unforeseeable ways. If you're the kind of jackass who dismissed the idea because we already had vacuum tubes, then you're the same kind who thinks modern R&D is a waste of money.
As much as I dislove Microsoft, I'm glad they're doing this stuff. Apparently they understand the importance even if a few short term profit-takers are too stupid to see it.
They're welcome to sell their shares if they don't like it.
When you get as big as Microsoft (as in, you've saturated your market) you've got to _create_ new markets to sell to. This is why they dump so much into R&D.
If they want to fuss at MS they should fuss about the guys that came by the office the other day. They do pretty much nothing but drive around to different people that purchase Microsoft Server licenses and tell them "Eh? Go read the documentation, it's all in that book we gave you. No, sorry, we can't do that, this is how the product works and if you don't like it, too bad." IE, they do nothing. They make ~$500K each and tether their laptops to their cellphone and play WoW all day while not telling clients to figure it out.
There probably aren't many of those guys though.
Re:Apple isn't even spending that (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that $150 million realllllllly is what made the difference, at a time when Apple had $4 billion in the bank.
I believe it was more the commitment about bringing Office and IE to the mac + giving Apple some good news to spread around. Make investors happy ya know, so they won't demand those 4 bill paid out in cash.
Re:Shareholder, huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Divest your money and buy land.
It's a freaking fire sale.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. At such time as "angry shareholders" produce their own useful technology, I'll listen. Until then, I thank Bell Labs, Google, and anyone else who has understood that the best technical innovations happen without micro-managerial bean counters.
Re:Death march (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Geez, about the only good thing that we could agree upon about Microsoft is that they do some research even though they may not complete the projects. I'd rather attack them for the really stupid stuff than for doing research which might actually give them a clue.
to R&D or not to R&D (Score:2, Insightful)
The question should be, are MS shareholders getting value for money from the R&D ?
And frankly, I'm not seeing anything recent that looks like it was worth $8bn.
For sure, some research will probably show long-term benefits, but at least some of it must start to show benefits around now; after all, this is not the first year that there has been heavy R&D investment. Where are the cool things to show for it that improve our lives.
Or is "Touch" it, really, billions for "Touch" ? My dog could have developed something better than that for only $4bn a year.
I suggest M$ give all their money to the guy who does the tricks with the Wii controllers.
Or to my dog.
Re:Budget (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it crosses over to the development team. When you first hear about a new version of Windows, it generally has some features that actually sound cool.
Then management cuts the features and all that's left is the previous version of Windows with a new interface. That's where the crossover is failing.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth pointing out that though COOL may not have been out of Microsoft Research (the speech-recognizing Singularity-coders), it almost certainly was under the R&D bottom line in MS's accounting, and the size of the R&D bottomline is what has the investors pissed. I don't think these particular investors would know "Microsoft Research," that of Singularity and Speech Recognition, from Adam.
R does not have to be impractical (Score:1, Insightful)
Apple contributes a ton to real world open source projects. How is that not R? WHat about GCC, or Squirrelfish, or ZeroConf, or launchd or Apache or Webkit or...
You get the picture.
Well actually you don't, but I'll bet you had fun spewing venom at your favorite company.
Just because it's not done by a bunch of guys who never see the real world and never produce real products, does not mean it's not R. R can actually lead to practical things too.
Apple is just smarter in leveraging open source software to get more bang for developer time and money spent.
I'm also not quite sure how you could look at the iPhone and claim Apple does no R (well actually Im very sure, willful blindness being worn on your sleeve and all) but whatever floats your leaky boat.
If their R&D... (Score:5, Insightful)
At $10,000 apiece, all MSFT has to do is sell 800,000 Surface tables and they've got their money back. I mean who doesn't want a big-ass kiosk in their home.
If their R&D has let them figure out a way to make $10,000 items which have a zero cost of goods, and don't have any marketing or support costs, they've got it made.
Sutting Down Game Studios (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has been shutting down their Xbox game studios over the past three years. They are now down to only three: Rare, Lionhead, and Turn 10. Along with their talk of not releasing new Xbox hardware any time soon it sounds like they are easing out of the console market.
They surely see that they went with the absolutely cheapest console hardware and still lost billions. With no consumer electronics design and manufacturing capabilities of their own there is no reason that they would do any better with yet another try at console hardware. More reliable and better built hardware is going to cost more money. And no one at Microsoft appears to be in any mood to continue spending billions on products that are doing nothing for Microsoft as a whole.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple isn't even spending that (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is not doing research on pie in the sky pet projects, but is rather focused on doing exactly what needs to be done to make a good user experience for the products that they sell.
The unstated premise of your post seems to be that Apple should also be trying to research stuff for the sake of doing research. Although I like the idea of a corporate entity giving back to the public (since, after all, the original idea of a corporation was that it existed for the public good -- not the shareholders), this kind of research isn't for the public good; it's to do an IP land grab -- like some dog peeing on a bush to mark its territory.
It would seem that Apple is simply focused on what they're good at. They're not trying to dabble in everything so they can claim some licensing rights later on.
I hope that we see an end of these massive R&D departments, since they are simply a symptom of the very broken patent system.
Re:Apple isn't even spending that (Score:5, Insightful)
And finally, academia and computer science research shouldn't be beholden to any corporate entity. Our institutions should be funded by the government. The ideas should be public property.
Re:R does not have to be impractical (Score:5, Insightful)
Contributing to open source projects is not research; it is development focused on open-source products instead of closed-source products. Research would be developing new ways to improve operating systems, compilers, and web servers, for example, based on certain criteria (performance, security, design, etc.). For example, Plan 9 is a research project. There is plenty of research in academia and industry that are geared toward solving real-world problems. For example, many of the advances in computer hardware, such as deep pipelines and multicore processors, started out as research problems. But contributing to an open source project is different from research. I fail to see how contributing to GCC or WebKit per se solves any problems in computer science, which is the definition of research, unless those contributions are a result of research.
Re:Ballmer's Xbox Fiasco, Search Insanity, And Oth (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to say this few month ago, until I started coming across Vista computers infected with all kinds of exotic trojans and malware. The security model on Windows has gone from complete anarchy to "here's a computer - train it yourself." The burden has been shifted towards the user. That's not progress in my view.
Also, I'm not convinced about Xbox being a fiasco. Out of all the billions they have wasted, this one looks like a winner in the long run. They're one generation away from dominating the high-end console space in an event of one more Sony fuckup with PS3. You could never count Sony out when it comes to massive fuckups.
Re:Stalemate. (Score:2, Insightful)
MS has to at least pretend their interested in building large revenue streams beyond the OS and office productivity sectors. By spending large amounts of money on R&D, they can tell the world "Hey look we're investing in our future!" while simultaneously throwing chairs, playing the standards committee coercion game and bending consumers over a barrel to keep them on the upgrade treadmill.
I Think I See The Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the entire problem with incorporation. If Microsoft were to dissolve their Windows branch and focus entirely on cool things (Zune, Xbox, Silverlight) then the world would be a much better place all around, but instead, they're forced, by legal obligation, to work on making stock prices as high as possible.
Shareholders need to go fuck themselves.
Re:Stalemate. (Score:5, Insightful)
On one hand it must keep evolving and changing to attempt to be better than Linux and Apple
That's not the Microsoft I know. The Microsoft I've come to know focuses on (a) maintaining its dominance in the office environment and (b) imitating other technologies' success stories as quickly as possible. That's not evolving, that's mimicry.
Re:Stalemate. (Score:1, Insightful)
I doubt you could say that MS is growing its business with R&D, otherwise the shareholders wouldn't be so livid. Interesting how IBM has such a better record with R&D.
Re:R does not have to be impractical (Score:3, Insightful)
ZeroConf is absolutely research. It involved Stuart Cheshire coming up with a bunch of totally new ways to leverage DNS to provide dynamically self-configuring networks.
Re:Budget (Score:4, Insightful)
While they're being accused of squandering billions, it is quite possible that they have provided that much value to the industry as a whole. What the investors are really complaining about is their inability to produce something unique and patentable that is so compelling it sells licenses regardless of the (lack of) value elsewhere.
Investors are complaining because there's an economic downturn and they're losing money. They complain about different things with every company, but yes, they all complain.
while I don't have a lot of inside knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding is that until recently one of the big purposes of MS Research was just prestige, not really product production. MSR has consistently produced a very large amount of academic research in some key areas, e.g. almost always accounting for more than 10% of the papers at SIGGRAPH, year in and year out. Microsoft management was of the opinion that having something like that was useful to their business in indirect ways, even if those SIGGRAPH papers didn't directly lead to deals with CG film companies or anything. Is that true? I have no idea; it's kind of hard to measure intangibles like whether having a prestigious research group attached to your company increased your reputation to the point where it tipped the balance on an important sale or contract.
I think they were also going for the Bell Labs model, where the research group pays for itself if it's left to its own devices and very occasionally invents/patents something big. I have no idea what MSR's patent portfolio is like from a business perspective. Have they licensed any significant percentage of it? More intangibly, what proportion of Microsoft's defensive patent portfolio originated from MSR?
And finally, one of the unofficial purposes of MSR for years was just to hire up everyone so nobody else could. Microsoft had a dominant lead in a number of areas, and one way to protect that is just to deny all your competitors access to talent. Kind of the model Google is currently using (they hardly need 20,000 employees otherwise).
Re:Death march (Score:3, Insightful)
You are seriously underestimating the complexity of the task. In any case, essentially everything has been thought of before. Your bringing up lint is simply stupid: you are either saying that everything that's been done (by MS and others) in the area of static analysis is a knock off lint, which is simply an ignorant thing to say, or you are saying that the work done by Microsoft is *really* a knock-off from lint, which is false.
I wasn't comparing lint to anything, I mentioned lint as an example of static analysis that's been around for a very long time. The work done by Microsoft on Static Driver Verifier isn't new, and it isn't innovative, rather it's a implementation of a static analysis utility specifically geared towards verifying Microsofts driver model. There's nothing there that needs research or development, it's purely an implementation problem. I never said it was an easy thing to implement, but that doesn't mean it's innovative, complexity is not the same thing as innovation.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Geez, about the only good thing that we could agree upon about Microsoft is that they do some research even though they may not complete the projects.
The issues isn't that they do research, or even that Microsoft spends more than their peers. The issue is MS spends disproportionately more for research and loses market share. Instead of putting that money into creating the best operating system ever put on computers, they spend $7.5 billion and get the Zune.
Rumblings from the stockholders. Now isn't that interesting. Microsoft has been able to keep their earnings up, but so did Enron. Right up to the end.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Insightful)
They could refer to the company charter, which often has a phrase where the primary objective of the company is "to maximize profits and increase shareholder value". If that is the case for Microsoft (I have no reason to not think so here), the directors are violating a primary tenant of their charter if they spend money frivolously. From this it would be the basis of a lawsuit by violating the basic charter of the company and its legal right to exist.
A tech company investing in R&D, or even doing a bit of skunk works is not "frivolous". It is precisely aligned with a long view goal of maximizing profits and increasing shareholder value. The directors have a lot of leeway if this is all you have got to sue them on.
Re:Ballmer's Xbox Fiasco, Search Insanity, And Oth (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They aren't investors (Score:3, Insightful)
The original release of C#, which grew out of COOL, was indeed mostly a "let's copy it!" response to Java. But C# 2.0 and above is different. The design and implementation .NET generics came out [acm.org] of Microsoft Research Cambridge team headed by Don Syme, which included Andrew Kennedy. That same Don Syme is now heading the F# team (did you know Visual Studio 2010 will include Visual F#, by the way?), another longstanding MSR project. C# 3.0 and LINQ in general was strongly influenced by Haskell, specifically through Erik Meijer (worked on Haskell with Simon Peyton-Jones, and later designed VB9) and via C-omega and X# projects, both also of MSR - you should read Erik's paper "Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting the masses hooked on Haskell" about his role in LINQ and VB development, and its roots in his Haskell work (it used to be here [microsoft.com], but it's down at the moment).
So you're very, very wrong. In fact, as time goes, more and more Microsoft Research ideas and even implementations find its place in .NET platform and the languages.
Re:a lot of .NET development has been (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's investors have different priorities than you do. They want Microsoft's R&D to produce products that make money, not bad music.
Microsoft's investors are simply starting to wonder why they should pay for billions of dollars a year in research when they can keep Windows, MS Office, and the profitable server software divisions running with a much smaller investment.
research has always been driven by largesse (Score:2, Insightful)
Since time immemorial, research has been achieved by strong patronage from the rich. Basic research thrives in extreme affluence as there is no great motivation to make the dollar work. MSFT and GOOG have been so wildly successful and that is great for the current generation as they continue to employ smart people with little pressure to come out with products that sell but are only judged by the quality of their research.
It wont last long with either of these Companies, especially with MSFT losing ground to Google the pressure for survival is growing. I think the next set of Companies/entities doing basic research will come from China. They have a huge war chest of resources and are beginning to establish their monopoly.
Re:Death march (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:a lot of .NET development has been (Score:4, Insightful)
Re-implementing other established technologies inside of MS products doesn't really count as research in my book
Re-implementing technology is the basis of a hell of a lot of academic papers. (MSR also puts out more research work than any other company I can think of except maybe IBM.)
Think Bell Labs when you think of MSR. If it comes up with one or two useful things (Midori/Singularity look extremely promising), it's made its money. "Just because Microsoft has never done it, doesn't mean that it's new and innovative"? Just because you don't like what they're spending money on doesn't mean that it's a bad idea.
R&D is not always "innovation". Often it's just making something practical.
Re:a lot of .NET development has been (Score:2, Insightful)
In terms of technology and innovation though, Apple takes what it can from open source, and contributes back exactly as much as they're legally obligated to. They didn't design the operating system, and a lot of their original system APIs come from the NeXTStep heritage (and thus are implemented in Objective-C, which is not hugely popular but was probably the fastest way for them to take NeXT's stuff and start selling it).
Re:They aren't investors (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, ClearType came from R&D. You have to admit, it's pretty necessary in order for LCD monitors to take off.
Their handwriting recognition IME's did too.
In fact, *tons* of stuff that's in Windows and Office came out of MS R&D. It's just not that flashy.
Of course, tons more didn't. But that's how R&D goes.
Re:Culture (Score:3, Insightful)
Milk The Idiots Out Of Millions In Online Fees (Score:1, Insightful)
Having shut down almost all of their console development studios, and doing massive cost cutting, it looks like Microsoft's plan for the Xbox mess is just to stop wasting any more money on the turd of a product and milk the existing userbase out of the 50 dollar a year online fees for as long as possible.
The idea that Microsoft would spend another 2-3 billion on more Xbox hardware is laughable given what is going on in Redmond right now.
The 360 was supposed to be the console where Microsoft got it right. Staggering to think about just what a train wreck it turned out to be. Eight billion dollars wasted and the system is once again only selling to US and British gamers.
Re:Just to be fair: (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure you can. The comparison is mostly that Apple gets a lot more bang for its R&D buck than Microsoft does.
Secondly, Apple is in most of the markets Microsoft is in. Their cloud stuff (formerly called .mac, forget what it's called now) is small compared to Microsoft's, but they're in the market. Apple is a bit player in the server market, but they're in that market, too. Smartphones: check. Desktop/notebook OS: check. Mobile software check. Media players: check. Mobile phone hardware: check (Microsoft isn't even in that one). Game console: OK, no. Score 1 for Microsoft. Sort of. They don't make money on the Xbox.
I also have to dispute the claim that Microsoft has thousands of applications. Microsoft has fewer than you think, and Apple likely has more. The numbers aren't nearly as disparate as you state, although Microsoft has much larger ones, such as MS Office, SQL Server, and Exchange. In the desktop PC space, they're about equal. For every app that comes on a Windows machine, there's an Apple equivalent. MS has more apps on the server side, and probably more in the cloud computing space. The biggest lead area is in Xbox titles, since Apple isn't in the game console market.
The big difference is that so many of those are money-losers for Microsoft. Live/Hotmail/MSN. Xbox. Zune. All the money that has been poured into those has come from profitable product lines like Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server (and I'm just guessing that SQL Server is profitable, but it probably is). If Microsoft had stayed focused on its core strengths in the operating systems, desktop apps, and server apps spaces instead of trying to do and be *everything* and do much of it poorly, Microsoft would be both a far more profitable company and a far more formidable competitor.
Put another way, if MSFT had stuck to its core competencies, it would have an R&D budget that looked more like Apple's or Google's, but profit numbers that still look a lot like the ones it has anyway, selling the dominant desktop OS, a major server OS, the dominant office suite, Exchange, SQL Server, and its developer tools (which may or may not be a direct money maker, but they drive the Windows ecosystem and so are necessary).
MSFT today has its fingers in far too many pies and as a result is spending too much R&D money on things that never show a profit. The unhappy investors have a real point there, and it's a point many in the IT industry have been making for years.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spending money on R&D is not the same as "spending frivolously." The whole point of R&D is to experiment with new technologies, some of which pay off, some of which don't.
Kudos to Microsoft for actually investing in their future, rather than sitting on the cash pile. To hell with the whinging "investors" who expect money for free.
Re:a lot of .NET development has been (Score:3, Insightful)
Erk? Lambdas came from Haskell? What are they teaching kids in college these days...
So, lambda calculus is old. Like really old (the 30's). Its application, via lambda expressions, in computer science is at least 50 years old. Think about Lisp and its descendants, back in the mists of time, from the foundation of functional programming languages.
Crediting MSR (truly, any incarnation of microsoft, which emerged in the mid 70's) is disingenuous at best.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:3, Insightful)
> of the company is "to maximize profits and increase shareholder value". If that is the case
> for Microsoft (I have no reason to not think so here), the directors are violating a primary
> tenant of their charter if they spend money frivolously.
Trying to show that eight billion for R&D is sufficiently frivolous to warrant corrective action could be something of an uphill battle.
This is Microsoft we're talking about here. They can *afford* eight billion a year for R&D. Now, if they were spending that eight billion on something that clearly would not produce value, such as using Oracle stock shares as toilet paper in the executive restrooms, that might be actionable. But research and development is generally considered important for company growth in most industries, and this is even more true in the software industry than in most others. Someone could possibly argue that they could maybe be getting by with an R&D budget of only seven billion, but it would also not be difficult to argue that as much cash as Microsoft is rolling in there really is no excuse not to be spending ten billion on R&D. Their revenue in 2008 was about sixty billion, more than fifteen billion of which is net income, and that's not an unusually good year for them, and almost all of the money comes from selling products that were developed as part of earlier R&D efforts. (They do also make some revenue from returns on various short-term investments, but the lion's share comes from selling software licenses.) "Where's the ROI?", the shareholder asks? Bad rhetoric. The ROI is obvious and considerable.
What the whiners are essentially saying is, "Screw the future of the company, give us all the money as dividends!" But that would be bad business.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:2, Insightful)
There's little evidence that anything useful has come out of Microsoft Research. Ever.
I use Haskell a lot, and I can say that that's certainly not true. Simon PJ [microsoft.com] has made a tremendous number of contributions to Haskell.
Whatever your views on Haskell, it _is_ being used by a lot of people for practical purposes, so it's clearly not true that "[nothing] useful has [ever] come out of Microsoft Research".
I do not know if there are any other interesting projects being developed by Microsoft Research, but I would guess there are surprisingly many.
I Demand Protection From My Incompetence! (Score:3, Insightful)
Said one, 'I believe Bill Gates is a charlatan because...'
An investor said that?
And they believe Bill Gates was a seventh level magic user who magicked them in to investing with him through flim flammery?
Sorry the economy sucks but take some personal responsibility and stop blaming everyone.
If you're going to sit around annoying the shit out of everyone at the watercooler, telling them how you're a really smart investor when the economy's strong... you don't get to whine when it's weak. You took credit for your "decisions" then, they're still your decisions now.
If you were really so incompetent an investor to fall for "a charlatan" you probably shouldn't be investing anyway. And, if you do lose, hopefully the pain will be just sufficient enough to teach you that.
Re:If their R&D... (Score:4, Insightful)
The product you're looking or is called Exchange CALs.
Re:actually, Microsoft's investors disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:4, Insightful)
You've been modded funny but I would give this an insightful myself. It's similar to my new favorite phrase that I may have made up, "The less you know, the easier it is to have a strong opinion about it."
With the amount of money spent on marketing dwarfing what is spent on R&D by almost every industry, I cringe at someone saying too much is being spent on R&D. It may or may not be true in this case, but I think the larger problem is Microsoft's inability to execute on the ideas they come up with.
Case in point, the Zune could have been a great product had they taken the time to make the wifi useful and used their weight to pressure the music industry into giving customers a better, non-DRM'ed, experience. Instead they slapped together a product in their usual manner and went to the music industry to let the RIAA dictate what kind of experience they could give their customers.
Apple can spend a fraction of what M$ spends on R&D because they make up for it with good execution.
Re:Ballmer's Xbox Fiasco, Search Insanity, And Oth (Score:5, Insightful)
They've spent a LOT more than $5 billion on the Xboxen over the past decade or so. More like $25 - $30 billion, last I read. That's a truly staggering sum for a product line that's yet to earn them even a cool billion in profit over the same period.
It's even more embarrassing for Microsoft when you realize the Wii has forced them to cut the price of the Xbox 360 just to remain competitive saleswise - and they're still sliding into 2nd place in this generation for overall sales, in spite of having a year's headstart.
Even worse, Nintendo has been turning a profit on the Wii since very early on in its lifecycle. Microsoft just recently started turning any consistent profits at all on its videogame business, and last I read they're still losing money on every 360 they sell (they have to make it back on the games). In contrast, Nintendo is turning a profit both on their consoles and on the games.
In a lot of ways, I'd say Microsoft is an even bigger loser in this generation of the console wars than Sony. The PS3 is likely to have a longer lifespan in the market than the 360, giving Sony more of a chance to make money off the consoles (and games) in the long run. And by pushing Blu-Ray to some level of success at least Sony stands to make some money off that standard thanks to their enormous PS3 investment. In contrast, Microsoft has nothing to show for the whole Xbox investment besides - finally - an anemic quarterly profit for their gaming division.
Apple's making far more money off of the iPhone than Microsoft's making off of the Xbox, and it cost Apple far less money and took Apple far less time.
I think folks criticizing Microsoft for their R&D investments are on the right track. Microsoft has blown a ton of money on R&D and on trying to get into other markets besides desktop PCs, and much of it has been completely wasted. Several of their competitors have done a far better job, spending a lot less money.
Research is great, but you have to be able to translate that research into products people want to buy (that's the "development" side of R&D). Microsoft risks becoming the next Xerox - a one-trick pony who dominated one market, but who could never translate their extensive R&D efforts into successful products in different markets. Remember, it was Xerox who pretty much invented the modern graphical user interface PCs sport today, along with things like Ethernet and laser printers. Where are they now?
Re:Death march (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ballmer's Xbox Fiasco, Search Insanity, And Oth (Score:1, Insightful)
With the 360 now selling for less than the Wii, it's hard to justify calling the XBox "high-end" and the Wii "low-end". The Wii is dominating, period. The XBox has a clear lead in the hardcore gamer niche, and the PS3 is losing.
Shareholders should ask a different question! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course I do not have an oversight on all the projects. But I think that very many of the research that is going on at Microsoft Reseaerch is very interesting and could be fun or even useful in the future.
Examples: featured here on slashdot there was Songsmith ( http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/index.html [microsoft.com] ). And there are many others, just look at http://research.microsoft.com./ [research.microsoft.com]
MS has a long tradition in missing out oportunities. Because they are big and they follow a monopolist's strategy: that is to wait and see, look out for the profitable markets - then step in.
I keep telling the example of the impressive and really useful technology of RemoteScripting (although I do not know if it came from MS Research!). It was years out before the market understood the power of it.
At that time I had several clients who refused to use it, becaue it was proprietory MS (non-standard) and almost completely unknown in the industry.
Today it has become the underlying technology for something everybody knows: Ajax.
If MS had supported and promoted RemoteScripting
you get the point.
Re:Blaming Bill Gates??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:3, Insightful)
People always complain that R&D wastes money until they have no new products and the company goes under, or a new product comes out of the R&D department.
In the meantime, "R&D is blowing millions of dollars!"
It's usually the first thing cut when budgets are tight, but it is probably the worst thing to cut. It just ensures that your future prospects are even slimmer.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:3, Insightful)
Attitudes like theirs are going to destroy this country's lead in technology.
So many of the old research powerhouses have now fallen (Bell Labs is a mere shadow of its former self, don't expect anything as revolutionary as some of its former inventions to ever come out of there again - where would the world be without the transistor?), and it's a matter of time with modern attitudes towards research that the rest will fall.
Re:a lot of .NET development has been (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that's a very succinct summary of the situation. The part that you are leaving out, of course, is that Wine, Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Ubuntu all are developed on a budget that is an order of magnitude smaller than Microsoft's R&D budget.
Microsoft spends a lot more money than its competitors on R&D without a great deal more to show for its efforts. What's more, in recent years Microsoft has made expensive bets in areas like console gaming, online marketing, and embedded systems, that have all been major losers. I would never say that R&D isn't a good thing, but I certainly would hesitate to give *my* money to the R&D department at Microsoft, and Microsoft's stock price shows that I am clearly not alone.
Seriously, take a look at the Microsoft "innovations" that people in this discussion are talking about in this thread. Songsmith and Kodu are probably not going to make back their investment. Surface is ridiculously overpriced for what it does. Microsoft's .NET framework is pretty cool, but Novell has a functional clone of the framework for a fraction of the R&D costs. As you point out Wine, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, etc. are all close to being functionally equivalent to Microsoft's bread and butter projects. Apple is taking big chunks out of the high end PC market, and is dominating the most lucrative niches in the handheld and embedded spaces.
If I were a Microsoft investor I would be very concerned about how Microsoft was spending my money. Microsoft's R&D machine is clearly broken.