Why does Microsoft have research departments?
I wrote a longer article on this topic for The Independent this week but they seem not to have had enough space to print it. (Tricky stuff, paper.)
So here’s the text of a short - very short - article I wrote for Microsoft’s in-house magazine , and the response of Andrew Herbert, head of Microsoft Cambridge research, both reprinted here with their kind permission.
My article:
When IBM needed an operating system for the new PC, it didn’t ask its own experts to write one. It hired a small outside company – Bill Gates’s Microsoft.
That was 1982.
Now Microsoft is a giant too. Yet it’s making the mistake that IBM didn’t. New document format? Do it internally (hello Metro, goodbye PDF?). Music and video player? Do it internally (even if the EC gets annoyed).Incredibly, the R&D at Microsoft has become stagnant.
Even a gigantic company can’t compete with the millions of minds now on the Internet. It’s much easier to emulate IBM, as there’s so much more intelligence to tap. All you need do is organise it. Linux has. Apple has (its core OS is open-sourced, and it draws on open source in return).
Microsoft hasn’t, and it relies on Office and Windows for a cosy but uninventive existence.
The great ideas that have revolutionised how we work have not come from inside Microsoft – not the Internet, email, browsers, word processing, portable document format, RSS, videoconferencing, or Java. Microsoft now bestows (usually belated) legitimacy on existing technologies.
Microsoft should not be a rubber stamp factory. It, and we, would be better off with it split into bits – innovative, hungry bits.
Response by Andrew Herbert, MD of Microsoft Research in Cambridge (UK):
Far from stagnating, Microsoft’s $6.8 billion investment in R&D is taken very seriously. From a research perspective, at Cambridge, no one is told what to do – we conduct research based on our vision and interests in order to ensure Microsoft has a future.
One recent technical breakthrough, True Skill, connects communities of people that are best suited to each other ensuring an unprecedented gaming experience on Xbox 360 Live. This would not happen without the commitment and passion of the researchers involved and the support of the core development team in Redmond.
Innovation cannot occur in a vacuum. Collaboration – real, ongoing and mutually beneficial – is at the heart of the Research we’re conducting in Cambridge.
It is an important aspect of the Microsoft European Science Initiative and through that initiative, of our work with both INRIA and the University of Trento, to challenge the boundaries between computing and the traditional sciences.
Our research into computational biology, for example, might one day lead to more resilient, self-healing and ‘virus-proof’ software that knows how and when to update itself.
Fundamental innovation (in contrast to incremental product advances) take time. Through partnership and the application of some of the best minds in the industry, from within Microsoft and without, we’ll unravel the new fundamentals upon which the next 50 years of computing will be based.
OK, and now over to you all for your comments.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Bram Cohen (inventor of BitTorrent) takes it out on Microsoft Research.. (23 June 2005; score: 61.3%)
- Media Center PCs: is the demand there? (4 January 2005; score: 33.34%)
- Longhorn will have RSS! Welcome to 2003! (26 June 2005; score: 32.27%)
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