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Comment by melted | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has suffered a heck of a brain drain in the past decade. I don't believe they can recover from it in the long term. I also don't believe in innovation by executive edict. Google and FB models work because executive edicts are not necessary there: top researchers and engineers run the whole show.

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Microsoft research is nearly legendary in many academic circles. As prestigious as many top colleges. There are many brilliant people working there.

Admittadely, the prestige probably has a lot to do with the previous circumstances (work on whatever, don't worry about the company), but it seems like this will be a very beneficial move for Microsoft.

As IBM research. And now, the two companies are making a late debut of their cloud linux thingies, as well as porting every important software to it.

Research, yes. But Research alone can't pull this off. And most of the rest of the company can't tell logistic regression from a hole in the ground.

Almost nearly every single successful Google products were either developed out of research or out of 20%, or via acquisition. Most in-house business projects don't end up successful (Google Plus?) A big company has to invest heavily in R&D to push the limit. You just need one big idea that works and become a game changer.

At Google most in-house projects are infrastructural, and if you look at the scale at which they run and the fact that there's basically nothing that even comes close, they are wildly successful. You could also say Android was in-house, because what they bought is not at all what they ended up shipping. What they bought looked like a Blackberry rip-off, what they ended up shipping was an iPhone rip-off. And let us not forget Ads, the in-house system that has dominated online advertising for a decade now.

But I kind of fail to see what any of this has to do with Microsoft. :-)

Sources?

I'm an apple household in general, but have multiple devices.

Cortana is superior to Siri, Google is still better.

But you make a post with no actual facts.

If you mention the consolidation of MSR labs including the closure of that in Mountain View, that was a bad move (in my opinion).

But, trying to understand here. My experience over a number of years is that experienced individuals are transitory...People move around. Depending on the group in MSFT and Satya's mandate, churn may make sense.

A decade is multiple tech lifetimes...Someone stellar 10 years ago may be on it now or may not...

This level of general MS bs on HN gets a little tiring when there are no facts.

This is not true of Microsoft Research. MSR has for many many years been one of the top industry research labs. Only recently have Google Research and Facebook joined its ranks (and Facebook only in AI research).

I'd argue that Google Research (Jeff Dean) is still not what MSR is by reputation.

Facebook has been building a ridiculously strong VR/AR research team in Seattle

So, they can train new folks with some of the brain that is still left. To be honest, they didn't exactly strike me with prolific creativity, rather their business enterpreneurship was working and they still profit from that. It's good but average engineering, at average, moving slow but steady. If innovation happens elsewhere, they just copy it. So they try to in

So, in the long run they can train new folks with some of the brain that is still left. To be honest, they didn't exactly strike me with prolific creativity, rather their business enterpreneurship was working and they still profit from that.

It's good but average engineering, at average, moving slow but steady.

Says who? Legend?

Do you know what MSR is? K, thnx please try again. Do you know who Leslie Lamport is?

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