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: 61.28%)
- Media Center PCs: is the demand there? (4 January 2005; score: 33.33%)
- Longhorn will have RSS! Welcome to 2003! (26 June 2005; score: 32.28%)
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June 22nd, 2005 at 11:11 pm
God grief, Andy H. *has* been smoking the MS weed. What an amazing load of meaningless, corporate bullshit. The trouble with blue-sky work is that it takes 10 years to get it out there and where is the stuff that was done 10 years ago that should be coming out now? Bridging that gap is hard, and you can’t do it with crap.
June 22nd, 2005 at 11:59 pm
“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.”
…
“And through swift patent application, we will ensure that only Microsoft will power these 50 years of computing by suing the mortgage off anyone who has any idea in the same vague ballpark”
I don’t think the benefit of Microsoft research is based on the IT industry in the last 15 years since MS has consistently made the bulk of their cash through copying and refining and out-marketing.
The benefit is instead based on a future where profits are made on the strength and exclusivity of their IP portfolio. If their research department invents something slightly before someone else, as long as they patent it first it’s theirs, and the future legal winnings to boot. They won’t necessarily have to implement that new technology for years.
I run a software company, and yes it worries me that my freedom to make a living in future will depend on a lucky gambit that I’m not infringing on a hithero unnoticed Microsoft patent for something utterly generic.
…and that’s another debate…
June 23rd, 2005 at 8:17 am
Perhaps to be fair to Microsoft what they are describing is just their blue skies, basic research activities. It would appear that we don’t have much short term innovation going on in this group that will change much for most of us tomorrow (esp us Mac users!). What I’m confused on though is whether that $6.8bn is spent JUST in this area that Mr Herbert has described? I suspect not (it is a HUGE amount). So, he has really only partially answered your question.
Your points are very valid IMHO and the list you provide is excellent fodder. I think Microsoft’s legal department is the one that is key. It is about finding good IP out there. Then there are three steps. If you can, just replicate it internally. By putting the MS stamp on whether it’s as good doesn’t matter. If you can’t replicate it, then find some other way to get the IP through partnerships or buying it. Then do as before. Finally, if you can’t do this, you spend tons of money coming up with an alternative (eg Metro, .net) that you are going to force on the populace through your monopoly power.
I once worked for a reasonably big California software company that had something MS wanted. We (like mose companies) were quite interested in the partnership. But the legal clauses were such that (simplifying a bit) they got to own not just the IP for the derivative work that was done (in partnership theoretically) BUT also the whole of the original work too. I think this bully-boy tactics with software companies still goes on, and in some cases, the companies are so in awe and immature (at least legally) that they get taken in (one might include Apple in this giving away the stuff for all windows when they thought they’d just given permission for version 1). We walked away from the deal.
I think the analogy which used to be mentioned with the Star Trek Borg is actually not just a funny one but a pertinent one! MS just subsume anything they can that can add to their inpenetrable monopoly. They don’t really care how they do it and they are so big and profitable they will just do it somehow. That is their method of “innovation”. Unfortunately, it is done from a massive and unique position of strength. I don’t see how that can change until it is actually broken up in some way or truly forced to open stuff up (and I don’t mean pathetic attempts by the EU which are far too little and far too late). Interoperability is now so decent that the consumer would certainly benefit from such actions. It used to be said that the consumer benefited from this standardisation of the OS and apps. But that stage (if it existed) is well past, and MS is reaping monopoly financials from that state which are very damaging.
Anyway, this topic is a REALLY important one - one of those that isn’t in the news except occasionally but should be. That’s when we SHOULD be worried as someone else has posted here recently on another topic.
Ian
ps sorry for the long post again
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:33 am
I, for one, am delighted that $6.8 billion of research has uncovered better ways for teenagers all over the world to frag each other on Halo 2 :)
Naw, seriously, I’m sure they’re doing good work in Cambridge.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:39 am
They are doing good work in Cambridge. The question is, would it be *better* work if they weren’t doing it for a huge company that does operating systems and applications and everything else, but were working for multiple small Microsofts, as Judge Jackson suggested they should after the antitrust trial.
That’s what the last sentence of what I wrote is driving at. I’d be interested if anyone has data on where the breakthrough technologies come from. Big companies or small? Does it have any bearing on innovation?
June 23rd, 2005 at 12:46 pm
Charles
Interesting debate. You use the word “innovation” rather than “invention” which is pertinent. There is little doubt (in my mind) that invention comes almost exclusively from individuals/small groups. I wonder how much data on that though!
Innovation is probably much harder to pin down. The whole Silicon Valley Venture Capital industry is tied up in this (though not much of the UK VC sector any longer). So a lot goes into small start-ups. However, there are several stages to innovation. Few companies are good at early innovation, followed by commercialisation/productisation and then actual business operation. Many either fail or get consumed at different stages of their life usually when they fall at one of these hurdles. So, I would imagine real data on this is very hard to find. How do you categorise for instance the Symbian OS in Nokia phones (Psion/Symbian) or the X-Scale chip (ARM) from Intel used in many pda’s?
I wonder if the most interesting thing though is “disruptive innovation” ie innovation that allows a new business model to come into play and destroying an existing one. Can anyone think of something created by a large company that has done this? It usually results in severe upheaval of the existing company. Perhaps the IBM PC for instance as it was followed by many years of decline for IBM itself in its older markets of mainframes and minis? Most disruptive innovations have come from small companies. Amazon, eBay, maybe Yahoo, maybe Google. Others have perhaps come from uncommerical interests (ethernet, internet, http). I suspect large companies suppress research into disruptive technologies either blatantly or accidentally, even though they would be best (long term at least) to embrace it (examples include Blockbuster, every major record label).
If you do come across the data, it would be fascinating to do a bang-for-buck calculation though. Even if the larger companies are successful at innovating, I suspect that it is at comparatively great expense. If we learned the lessons from this, the impact would be amazing on things like curing cancer ($6.8bn would go a fair way on that goal)! There seems to be an acceptance that bigger is better for this, when I am inclined to the opposite view. I don’t think the two major cancer charities combining in this country will result in faster solutions. Instead it is about administration, marketing and letting scientists get fat through too high a level of comfort. Did you know that the university star rating system used in this country to define funding for universities rates primarily on a scientists publication record? 4 papers are better than 3 (depending on journal). However, there is NO account made of the fact that those 4 papers were produced in a lab of 10 people with funding of £500k and that the 3 papers were produced in a lab of 3 people with funding of £150k! Result = 10 person lab gets more money; 3 person lab gets less! Is that not unbelievable?! And you can probably bet the 10 person lab probably gets some commercial funding too and has friends sitting in strategic places.
The problem is that the vested interests WITH THE FUNDS are primarily aligned to feathering their own existence and justifying it. I think this applies in Microsoft, in IBM, in BT and most large companies (heh, even Apple!), and it also applies increasingly in the so-called academic R&D world.
I personally believe this is a real consequence and one of the most dangerous results of applying the “Anglo-Saxon” (ie heavy capitalist) model to everything we do. I’m not anti-capitalist at all, but if innovation peters out, it will be a key driver in the decline of Western civilisation (sustainable growth depends on innovation). We need to free the thinkers of tomorrow not just from state control (ie see what happened with Russian innovation) but from large company/organisation control which is having a similar effect.
Get that data and prove this point!
Ian
June 26th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
“ICI’s own paints laboratory held an internal audit and what they found puts this claim in an entirely different light. For the audit showed that the most scientifically qualified of its research chemists had contributed to the least number of patents, and the fewer scientific qualifications the staff possessed, the greater the number of patents they had contributed to. In the most striking case of all, the person who had contributed to most ICI’s patents had no scientific qualifications at all.”
http://www.alternativescience.com/flame-proof.htm
This should come as no surprise.
Carbon 60 was discovered accidentally, as was stainless steel, as was……..
Many more discoveries are made by scientists working outside of their regular sphere of expertise; these discoveries are universally ridiculed by the ‘experts’ - who often have most to lose.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/laithwaite_eric.shtml
http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html
The essence of discovery is found in being multi-talented, the much maligned ‘jack of all trades’. Those who have been trained in one field alone rarely break out of the strictures of their education.
In respect of Microsoft’s R&D the budget is very flexible. Research in to how to sell the same products over again to the same people can easily be transfered from the Marketing budget to the R&D budget. Similar with Legal, most legal work is research. Some folks believe Microsoft’s greatest innovations are in the field of creative accounting, that probably took some research too :-)