It has been awhile, but MSR used to be the place where people went and still published, while Google Labs was a black hole. I remember some Google guy giving a talk at NIPS, but it was just a presentation from a shared corporate slide deck, which did not fit in with the rest of the conference. Google attracted some really good machine learning folks (temporarily) by offering them boatloads of money and manpower to implement their ideas, not freedom to publish. Has that changed?