Microsoft Research Turns 10 302
Alec Muzzy writes: "Did you know that Microsoft Research, the first research laboratory started by a software company, just turned 10 years old? Their website is currently featuring some highlights of their research in the past 10 years and how it is applying to the new products Microsoft is making today - for instance their work in Real-Time Fur will be used in some XBox games, and Speech Recognition may be in future Pocket PC's. Reading these pages gives you a real insight into what new technologies Microsoft is working on."
Re:They also gave us Bob (Score:5, Informative)
It's kind of silly to have such a good research lab and then barely pay attention to it. On the other hand, they don't ignore it quite as much as Xerox ignored PARC. The real issue is that pure research, while very important for the quality of future software, is generally too far ahead of it's time to be useable by anything the parent company is doing.
I suspect that, in ten years, people will be as impressed by the work that was done at MS Research as people today are with the work done at PARC.
The particular problems that MS is facing currently aren't really interesting to the research people, because they're all tied to the particular set of products that are currently in the process of being phased out. They're interested in things that will still be useful after the commercial implementation gets botched by the inexperienced programmers and mangled by marketting and then the industry moves to the next concept; by the time their work is done, NT will be totally gone and multi-media will be done in dedicated memory on FPGA boards.
There's a difference... (Score:5, Informative)
Which brings up the next point in that there is often a difference between doing what's "Right" and doing what's profitable. Easy is what sells to most folks. Secure is not. (talking generalities here...) And making things secure often makes them dramatically less easy. Since the primary purpose of Microsoft is to make money, easy will always win out over secure in their world. Good, bad, or indifferrent, that's the way it is. Follow the money trail and you'll understand why MS acts the way they do.
Limux has the opposite approach. Generally in the *nix world, performance (including stability, speed and options) usually wins out over outright ease of use. That's what the users of it demand. Certainly some things are very easy, but in many cases it's a different kind of easy for a different kind of audience. Whether that is good or not is an excercise left to the reader. (i.e. you)
Re:sounds like Apple's ATG... (Score:5, Informative)
Then reborn in the form of Apple's Advanced Computation Group [apple.com].
Re:Credit where credit is due (Score:3, Informative)
You're jumping *waaaay* ahead of yourself.
If you'd read the article, you'd find that it's *real-time* fur they've been doing (rather than pre-rendered), which is a completely different kettle of fish.
Re:peachy on the surface... (Score:2, Informative)
Um...that's what research is. Only super-humans like Einstein get to publish freestanding papers. Very little research is breathtakingly innovative. There's that whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing, you see.
Revisionist corporate propaganda (Score:2, Informative)
This is so obviously false, that it's hard to imagine someone would dare to post it to, of all places, Slashdot. It's harder to imagine that Slashdot passed it along.
Of course there were research centers before 1991. In particular there was the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which pioneered the windows-based interface expanded upon by Apple and MicroSoft.
But let's think back even further. IBM has been putting up research labs all over the world, and decades earlier:
Next thing you know, some Microsoft shill will be claiming that MS invented the Internet, 5 years ago.
Re:Clever wording (Score:2, Informative)
just the other day i was reading some publications on scheduling problems...ie operations research. they have a huge group doing business administration related research i believe, and their results are then directly applied to managing their global operations.
Re:They also gave us Bob (Score:2, Informative)
Ashton-Tate had Research group by 1988 (Score:2, Informative)
I know Ashton-Tate (the long defunct makers of dBASE) may be viewed by some as kind of a joke in microcomputer history, but I worked there for several years and we had a small but very professional research group with its own VP in Torrance, CA by at least 1988.
I'm tired of reading that Microsoft is/was the first software company to have a research group. Also, to pick nits further, Microsoft is not a software only company, since they have designed and sold peripherals such as mice and keyboards over the years.
Tom Rombouts, Torrance, CA
Black hole of research (Score:5, Informative)
They made people rediculous offers to lure them away from their universities and other companies.
One example recruitment I heard went like this.
ring ring
Hello?
Hello, this is Microsoft Research, we'd like you to come work with us
Why should I? I'd never work for the great Satan. [thinking that this would make the caller hang up. But, what would Satan say? You got it...]
Well, what are your terms?
Ummm [trying to think of something completely unreasonable] How about $XXX.XXX [twice what he was getting then.]
Fine.
Ok, I want to work three months, then take a month off, work three months, take a month off...
We can't do that. How about this, you work for four years, then you get four years off at that same rate.
uhhhhhhh, well, ok.
When they set up the CG research group, they promised to have half the papers in Siggraph (the premier forum for computer graphics research) in a few years. This was a little scary, but not as scary as what really happened. What really happened is that these people pretty much stopped publishing at all; and stopped interacting with the rest of the graphics community.
I asked a few of the people there about it, and they seemed happy as clams, they weren't worried about it. To me, it appears that their world had shrunk to be just Microsoft. It's more than a pity, it's almost criminal.
thad
Re:peachy on the surface... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think so, the Mitchelson-Moorely anomaly and the Lorentz contraction had been sitting arround for about 20 years without anyone making sense out of them before Eistein came along.
The leap from the special to the general relativity was already anticipated in the original paper. Einstein knew that the equations would have to be modified to take account of acceleration. The problem was finding a mathematical tool that was up to the job.
If Einstein had been hit by a bus after developing the special theory someone would have tried using tensor calculus to describe general relativity sooner or later.
The imaginative leap in special relativity was jettisoning the intellectual baggage of the aether and returning to Newton's relativity principle.
As for the theory being borne out by experiment, it is just as well that WW1 prevented the first eclipse measurement so that Einstein could develop general relativity in time for the next one.
Re:Has anyone else noticed.... (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, the original optical mice required a special mousepad for the mouse to track on. But it was only a matter of time before it could track on any surface. I'm willing to bet logitech's optical trackball sensors would work as mouse sensors on any surface. Again, not to say logitech came out with their optical system before MS, who knows. But I'm POSITIVE the optical mouse has been around far longer than MSR.