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."
Bill Gates? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Informative)
He's still chairman of the board.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this modded funny - he is still chairman of the board!
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe someone just decided to mod everything in this thread Funny?
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"He's still chairman of the board."
I thought Ballmer is the chair man.
Re:Bill Gates? Well.. (Score:3, Funny)
Ballmer CHAIRS the Board and he might CHAIR the BORED if he hasn't got their unprovided attention...
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Interesting)
So.... at the next shareholder meeting get rid of the guy!
Members of the board of directors are directly appointed to their positions (including the chair!) by the shareholders themselves. So in this case, the shareholders have nobody to complain about but themselves.
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.
BTW, corporate charters don't have to have this clause in their charter, nor is it really necessary with even a for-profit and publicly traded company to be so focused on profits. The problem is that this is so typical that many investors won't put money into a company unless this is explicitly in the charter. Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is one of the companies I know of that is publicly traded but does not have this in the corporate charter.... but companies like this are an exception.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, they're elected at shareholder meetings. Slightly different, but I agree that if the shareholders don't like what the board of directors is doing, it's their own damned fault for electing them.
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.
You still have to feel sorry for them ;) (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I was thinking much along the same lines. Go to court and tell them, "yeah, some of the R&D won't pay off, but the ones whic do allowed us to make X, Y and Z, and earn royalties from licensing W to other." Then I remembered it's Microsoft. I can just see it,
"Your honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I draw your attention to exhibit 1: without an R&D budget we couldn't have made the Zune. Erm, ok, so its market segment imploded to nearly zero during the Christmas period, but we couldn't have made it without R&D."
"Then we have our continued investment in expanding and improving our search engine business, so maybe one day it won't get its arse handed to it by Google that hard. In fact, I can sense a Google-killer coming. Step 3 in that business plan is that either an advanced extraterestrial civilization hands over their search engine, or the whole Google has a heart attack when we're around so we can claim the kill. Then one day maybe we can sell advertisments too and actually make an income out of it. But let's not get that far ahead of us."
"We have invested heavily in developing a state of the art DRM that will allow us to own the digital media market... at a time where DRM is producing more and more of an allergic reaction in the market, and the major media labels are experimenting with dropping DRM entirely. We think that the incompatible DRM and the 'plays for sure' thing not actually playing even on previous versions of itself are what helped kill the Zune, come to think of it."
"We have invested millions in the newest version of Internet Explorer, so, umm, it could continue to slowly lose market share to Mozilla and Opera. But without R&D, we wouldn't have had the new stuff in it. Ok, so it's a toolbar and browser tabs. You don't think that Mozilla's toolbar and tabs copied themselves into our product, do you? That's what we need R&D for."
"Then it's our R&D which produced such technologies as .Net and C#. Ok, so it just made Vista more bloated and everyone uses Mono for it anyway, but we think we at least managed to piss off Sun a little. And don't pay attention to claims that it just ripped off Java. If you'll look at the next exhibit, a simple C# program and its Java equivalent... you'll notice two extra curly braces per class and a typo in a keyword... err... I mean a new highly-innovative keyword. Clearly such visionary changes wouldn't happen without billions invested in R&D."
"We have also improved our Games For Windows brand name, and strengthened recognition of that brand, via innovative improvements that our talented R&D teams have produced. For example in Fallout 3 it made the game randomly crash when starting or exitting, and needed an extra patch just to fix that. It also created a demand for hacks to remove it from the victim... err... customer's computers. I think I'm not exaggerating when I say that now everyone knows about Games For Windows. Our data mining the web with our search engine has shown that nowadays the phrase Games For Windows shows up ten times more often than a year ago, though most often after the word 'fuck' or before the word 'sucks', or within the same paragraph as the phrase, 'how do I uninstall it?' You can't buy brand recognition like that with marketing alone."
"Then thanks to years of R&D, we have produced Vista. Umm... Your honour, can you make them stop laughing so I can continue? Thanks... We call Vista a great success, because almost everyone who got it on their computer, then bought Windows XP at a premium just to get a usable computer. So we sold them two operating systems, whereas without Vista they'd have only bought one. Everyone else sued us instead. And some did both."
"And speaking of Vista, our R&D has produced anot
Re: (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:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
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: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.
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.
Ballmer's Xbox Fiasco, Search Insanity, And Others (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the late 1990s and earlier Microsoft's business plan was much simpler: "Windows Everywhere" was the motto and battle cry. Once the stock peaked and Windows had long hit saturation in the big computer markets things became more complicated. That was right around Gates handed things over to Ballmer.
However, that doesn't excuse Ballmer for the massive failure of leadership and execution during his tenure.
The 8+ billion dollar Xbox fiasco.
The mind bogglingly poor execution of the search team
The total flop of the Zune
The equally mind bogglingly poor result of MSN/online
People have described Ballmer having created a "Culture of Failure" at Microsoft. A culture that embraces throwing billions of dollars at a bad project of idea over a million dollars at an equally bad project or idea.
Ballmer seems to have a business plan that is simply nothing more than to "Kick Ass".
The hit to the Windows profits have been a wake up call to everyone at Microsoft. The days of feeling like Windows and Office would be an never ending flow of cash to throw at anything and everything are over.
The cuts we've seen so far are nothing. Ballmer is still of the mindset of trying to cut as little as possible to appease the Street. Until he is gone Microsoft will continue to flounder and slide sideways to lower.
Loser products like the Zune hardware are on the way out. The Xbox fiasco is most likely next to get the axe. Search and the online services messes need to be given a short timeline to get their act together or be axed.
Microsoft has really got their shit together with the security and stability of Windows. A Microsoft with a visionary and competent leader could be a giant nightmare for Linux and Apple.
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:Milk The Idiots Out Of Millions In Online Fees (Score:4, Informative)
You honestly think that 360s are outselling Wiis here? As somebody who actually works in a store selling video game consoles, I assure you that is not the case. If we could keep Wiis in stock for more than a day or two at a time I'm sure they'd sell even better, but as it is I've probably seen as many Wiis sold as PS3s and 360s combined.
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
Re:Ballmer's Xbox Fiasco, Search Insanity, And Oth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They are dominating the high-end console space, with Wii dominating the low-end. The PS3 is a clear 3rd, and will probably not catch up. It might all change with the next generation, though.
That's a dubious distinction, if they're not making any money by doing so. The number of warranty repairs they've had to make is astounding.
And who cares about high or low-end? A 360 is barely more expensive than a Wii, and should theoretically be capable of everything that the Wii is, if it's a "high-end" machine (it's not, but that doesn't change the fact that neither Sony nor Microsoft have even attempted to capture part of Nintendo's marketshare). From the investor's point of view, the Wii has comple
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:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
(...)
$ ls -l
brwxr-xr-- ballmer execs 4 1954-11-03 20:31
$ echo "So thats what the problem is"
Kernel Panic - not syncing
WTF
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed, bashing Microsoft is inappropriate. But Python isn't the answer.
Microsoft should perled, for only then can you say
.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Mod twitter funny.
You usually don't get to see this kind of schizophrenia outside of the movies. It's actually amusing to watch his paranoid delusions build on themselves, as the AC below (which is clearly twitter, again) shows.
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.
Re:Death march (Score:5, Funny)
These days Gates only owns about 8% of MSFT. He probably has greater influence than his ownership. 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. :P
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.
Re:If their R&D... (Score:4, Insightful)
The product you're looking or is called Exchange CALs.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, can you seriously name one product that's come out of MS R&D that counts as a success (discount anything that's a blatant knockoff of a pre-existing product, embrace and extend/extinguish is not R&D)?
The Static Driver Verifier. Okay, so it's given away free with the DDK, but it indirectly helps them since driver quality is now by far the main stability problem Windows has.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the research has already been done so all they needed to do was actually implement a version for their driver model
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.
Re: (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 in
Re:Death march (Score:5, Informative)
It's also not new, as static analysis has existed in various forms for quite a while (lint is a form of static analysis).
The work that the SDV is based off of is called SLAM, and it was as much an advance to the field of static analysis as anything people do today is.
Take a look at the publication list [microsoft.com] from the SLAM project. The research that has gone into it has seen publication in POPL twice (along with PLDI one of the two top-tier conferences in PL), CAV three times (also extremely good), and many other venues.
The BLAST project, which is in some sense a successor to SLAM (not at MSR work), has seen quite a bit of additional publications.
You quite clearly don't know what you're talking about; PL is my research area, so I somewhat do.
Microsoft Research is one of only a couple industry research labs that publishes research of similar quality and quantity to a good research university (another is IBM; Google definitely doesn't). I am much less opposed to MS than most people at /., but I will steadfastly defend MSR.
a lot of .NET development has been (Score:5, Informative)
A bunch of the .NET languages, runtimes, and compiler features originated in or were developed closely with Microsoft Research, and some parts (like F#) were almost wholly developed there.
Although it's not very much liked by Slashdotters, Songsmith [microsoft.com] has also been relatively successful. Kodu [microsoft.com] is also getting a reasonable amount of press, and helping to solidify XNA's lead in the education-via-games space.
More generally, they develop prototypes of a lot of ideas that get reimplemented by the "product" side of the company. For example, MSR has been experimenting with adding machine-learning and data-mining features to MS desktop products for years, something that the product group is now starting to do with Excel. Those sorts of things are harder to quantify of course--- did the MSR experiments in that area help the product team at all? Would they have done the same anyway? Hard to say, but in general I think the advantages of having an R&D division in your company are undercounted in these "soft gains" ways, which is one reason that once companies downside their R&D divisions, the product groups stop producing as many new things as well.
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.
actually, Microsoft's investors disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
One tiny Microsoft investor, who admittedly doesn't even like their products, objects to their current strategy. Much, much larger Microsoft investors, such as Bill Gates, disagree with him. Since they own the company and this guy does not, their say wins out.
If he does represent a majority of Microsoft shareholders, he can of course propose a shareholder resolution and try to outvote Bill Gates at the shareholder meeting, or even replace the current MSFT directors with a new slate.
Re:actually, Microsoft's investors disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
It's more than one investor, as evidenced by Microsoft's decreasing stock price despite a huge stock buyback program. Lots of investors have taken their cash elsewhere.
Think what you want, but don't be surprised if Microsoft starts to rethink its R&D spending. Microsoft's stock has been flat or down even during the previous good years, and now that the economy is in the toilet its investors are going to start to wonder why they are financing so much R&D with so little to show for their investment.
Re:actually, Microsoft's investors disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing in .NET is new so I don't really see how much research would have been necessary to produce it. I'll give partial credit for F# as even though functional languages aren't new (no matter how you slice it) a modern implementation build on top of a pseudo VM like CLR is at least semi-novel.
Speaking of functional languages - keep in mind that two (maybe more?) lead developers of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler are full-time Microsoft Research employees. Specifically, it's Simon Peyton-Jones, who is also a coauthor of the original Haskell spec.
Now you say that nothing in .NET is new, but what about the features that got at least in part borrowed from Haskell (such as lambdas and LINQ)? No-one's saying that .NET was cooked up in MSR; but there is definitely a steady flow of ideas from various MSR p
Re: (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.
Stalemate. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Stalemate. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, there's always dividends... If Apple can do it on half the budget, and Linux can do it on what, 1/100th the budget (veeeery rough estimation, folks)?
Maybe what they need to do is to point their R&D in better directions, shake up its staff hard (starting at the top), and roll the rest into dividends.
This way the shareholders will be less sue-happy, they don't fall afoul of monopoly concerns, and they might even get a bit of profit out of all that innovation they keep talking about. We also get better and/or decent new products as a side-benefit.
I know, too much to ask and all, but they're going to have to do something, what with their marketshare shrinking and all...
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.
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.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're the kind of jackass who dismissed the idea of transistors because we already had vacuum tubes
Darn it, hit Submit too quickly.
Re:They aren't investors (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the key issue: There's little evidence that anything useful has come out of Microsoft Research. Ever. They fund a lot of pie in the sky projects, with the resulting technology appearing to sit on the shelf indefinitely. A very odd situation for a technology company.
I've stated this before and I'll state it again. I often think that Microsoft Research is a way for MS to keep the top researchers away from the competition. Microsoft themselves doesn't have anything to do with them, so they simply let th
Re:They aren't investors (Score:5, Informative)
Well, here's an anecdote.
6 or 7 years ago, when I was a low[er] level QA person at MSFT, I had a recurring meeting with someone from MSR because my division was using the new binary analysis and instrumentation tools that they had cooked up. I was one of the people implementing that toolchain in our production and testing process.
Now every product and every team at Microsoft uses that toolset.
Every year, MSR holds "Techfest", which is kind of like the science fair, except all of the experiments are awesome. MSR folks setup boothes/demos etc to show off what they've been up to. Normal MS employees attend this thing to allow for exactly the sort of informal, node-to-node idea exchange that ends up building the bridges from academia to engineering that you posit must not exist. And that is just one mechanism -- one that is accessible to low-level people in product groups for them to learn _what_ interesting things are happening, and who is doing them, and how to stay abreast of what's going on there.
I had an email conversation last month with someone at MSR who does visualization reseach about the publicly-downloadable visualization controls. I'm using them in one of my internal reporting tools and have some feature asks and was explaining some of the problems I'm having with the currently released bits. They've got new stuff they've been working on that will probably help me out when it's ready, and now they're aware of one more "real-world" use case for visualuzations of the type they're working on.
I'm a nobody, leaf-node QA engineer. And I've had interactions with MSR that have made my job better and easier, and the products I've worked on better.
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:They aren't investors (Score:5, Informative)
C# and .NET were born out of the COOL project. COOL was a engineering response to Sun's lawsuit over Microsoft's attempts to extend Java in incompatible ways. Microsoft Research was never involved in the development of .NET.
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.
Re: (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 th
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: (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.
Me thinks... (Score:4, Interesting)
This has less to do with Bill Gates mumbling and jumbling and more to do with the stock market tumbling and tumbling.
Re:Me thinks... (Score:5, Funny)
Keep going, you almost had a fresh prince going there.
And all I got was... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
A dangerous precedent (Score:5, Interesting)
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM's various research labs, 3M's research and others have all generated wonderful new things from their basic research. Google is just one company that encourages employees to spend a portion of their work time on personal research projects.
And now as we bemoan the "next-quarter" mentality of corporate officers and the decimation of basic research, along comes this bunch.
If corporations can't do basic research for fear of being sued, we might as well just pack up our remaining industry and ship it overseas right now.
Re:A dangerous precedent (Score:4, Informative)
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM's various research labs, 3M's research and others have all generated wonderful new things from their basic research.
And yet for all the raves these research groups generate, it very seldom turned into successful product launches for the parent company. Xerox is famous for inventing lots of cool technology that became successes for other companies. Bell Labs had a fearsome reputation, but much of its output never ended up in BellCorp products - otherwise we would still be talking about AT&T as a dominant Unix vendor.
3M is a better example, but most of their projects are closer to home - production engineers working on product ideas of their own, rather than basic research.
MS Research may do great things, but few companies are willing to take the schedule and financial risk that goes along with productizing a new technology. Making the jump for R to D is difficult for a company that wants to know a schedule, budget, ship date and ROI within plus/minus 10%.
Re:A dangerous precedent (Score:5, Informative)
Xerox is a good example of this. However, the other two are less good. You mention that 3M doesn't have a particularly large research arm separate from their manufacturing R&D. As for Bell Labs, remember that at the time it was truly ferocious, it wasn't allowed to do much with their technology because of the company's regulated monopoly status. They could develop UNIX for internal use all they wanted (and transistors and routing algorithms and...), but they couldn't actually sell it outside the Bell System. And by the time they could sell it externally, it wasn't like they had anyone left who could have productized or sold it for them.
In reality, corporate R&D has been dying for the last thirty years, except in the military space. It's a shame because the investors are simply eating the seed corn from which new products could have sprung.
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: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: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: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: (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.
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
What?!? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Shareholder, huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
In agreement is shareholder Mike McDonald. McDonald owns 118,000 shares of Microsoft, bought in 2000 at an average price of $36 share (adjusted for splits and dividend payouts).
118K shares huh? Well, that's certainly a lot of money to me and probably most people reading this, but considering the fact that 8.89BILLION shares are outstanding, Bill Gates owns ~766MM [msn.com], institutions (which are generally very passive owners) own over a billion shares [msn.com], and mutual funds (mostly owned indirectly by you and me through 401k plans - also very passive owners) own a substantial amount [msn.com], I'm thinking MS is not too worried about this.
Personally, I'm a little more concerned with the bank stocks I own (a small pittance of, also through my 401k) and what they're doing. If there's a fight to be picked on Wall Street these days, it's with the management at banks which is currently raping us for our money, not with a company that is unsuccessfully trying to conduct R&D.
If you dislike where MS is going so much, don't be an idiot and complain that they should stop their R&D... just sell your stock! If I've got a problem with the banks insisting on hundreds of billions of dollars AND billions in bonuses, THAT'S a problem worth complaining about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Divest your money and buy land.
It's a freaking fire sale.
Blaming Bill Gates??? (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA:
Dude! You loaded up on the stock of a company whose products you don't even like, and watched it lose half its value without liquidating your position, and you're blaming Bill Gates for your problems???
MS-Shareholders are short sighted (Score:5, Funny)
Sometimes R&D isn't R&D (Score:5, Informative)
Depending on how Microsoft classifies it's workforce, this may be a simple labeling issue, Many companies call future development work R&D for tax purposes. I believe you can deduct or amortize part of your R&D budget. So, Windows 8 may very well be "R&D".
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: (Score:3, Informative)
"they're forced, by legal obligation, to work on making stock prices as high as possible."
that is false.
An ounce of truth, but the wrong argument (Score:5, Informative)
As a [remaining -- for now] Microsoft employee, I can tell you that there is lots of stuff going on here that gets cancelled. Things do not always pan out.
There are probably projects and people that could be cut. MS could probably be more efficient.
Generally, I've seen good technology and near-finished products get killed for political reasons. That work tends not to be completely lost, however. Near-produts tend to have their interesting technologies teased apart, refactored, and re-incorporated into future MS offerings.
However, much as I malign them, I trust the various managers within MSFT to make R&D and strategy decisions over some dipshit that owns 200 shares of MSFT and is irate that he's not seeing '95->'99 era stock price appreciation.
The MSFT stock has been garbage for a long time -- and I am sure I own more of it than the average complainer. Microsoft has always spent money all over the place because real progress takes investment. The company continues to be highly profitable and doesn't appear to need micromanagement from people looking to get rich via stock speculation.
I haven't carefully analyzed the ramifications, but I am at least emotionally drawn towards the idea of MSFT rebuying _all_ of its public stock and telling the market to FOAD.
Last I checked our market cap was down in the $200B range, so I don't think that's a plausible option, given our cash position.
4 MSR-initiated products off the top of my head (Score:5, Informative)
- Parallel Extensions to .NET
- Surface
- Photosynth
- WorldWide Telescope
I don't know if Parallel Extensions is worth $8 billion, but it's a huge deal and the cornerstone of the ManyCore/Multicore work MS is doing. It's pretty freaking cool. (And the Mono folks have already implemented it...)
research.microsoft.com (Score:4, Informative)
It may not be popular or known to common users, but Microsoft Research [microsoft.com] is actually fairly well known for its work and yields plenty contributions to scientific publications - so it isn't like they aren't doing anything [microsoft.com]. Here are some [microsoft.com] random [microsoft.com] pages [microsoft.com] from the site.
If anything, it's surprising that more of it doesn't bubble up into consumer products. Maybe it's simply mismanaged or mistrusted by the management?
Microsoft's fountain is polluted (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm tired of splitting hairs to find reasons to make Microsoft look bad. This type of submission is equivalent to tabloid shit and doesn't warrant hundreds of comments, even the same comments as last time someone put Microsoft under a microscope.
Good for Apple, bad for Microsoft, let the shareholders figure it out; now throw this submission under idle and let's continue onto better spent time...
Just to be fair: (Score:3, Interesting)
You cant compare the R&D budgets of apple and Microsoft as their product lines are far different.
Microsoft has 1000's of applications across several markets, apple has 100's ( if that ) across a handful of markets.
Its almost like comparing Tesla Motors to GM...
finally realizing it's been snakeoil all along (Score:3, Interesting)
wow, it's taken "shareholders" this long to figure out it's all been a sham? Windows is what brings in over 80% of the revenues and billions a blown year after year on money losing ventures and that thing they call R&D. R&D is a really nice black hole to hide and move money around too. I remember a few years back when MSFT cut R&D by 50%( down to ~$3.2billioin from ~$6.4billion ) and magically a bunch of the other divisions showed profits for the first time. A couple of quarters later they were back to losing $100s of millions each.
The whole company is running on the 20 year old monopoly and they don't have any clue how to make a profit outside of Windows. And it sounds like shareholders are finally getting sick of this now that it's been something like 8 years with little value/growth and Vista, well I'm guessing that's pissing them off too. It also doesn't help when little Apple can launch products, v1.0 products I might add, and they are fantastically profitable.
LoB
Re:Budget (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't say their R&D budget goes into patents and lawyers. In the actual academic world, Microsoft Research is a very common institution to see on papers. They employ a lot of smart people who are coming up with a lot of good and useful ideas.
But there does seem to be a disconnect. Very little seems to crossover from their research people to the development teams.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
A good example of something that has crossed over from research into reality is the Generics in .Net, that started out as a compiler mod by some guys in MS Research.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Windows XP and Vista and 7 of 9 or whatever the new one is to be called. What more do you blood suckers want?
do you like computer graphics or CG films? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft Research consistently accounts for approximately 15% of the papers presented at SIGGRAPH every year.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)