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Comment by dataangel | Hacker News Reader

Ignorant question: Does much actually make it out of MS Research? I've seen lots of interesting retrospectives on stuff that either failed or just has never come out of the lab (Singularity/Midori, accessibility demos showing phones reading restaurant menus to the blind, their tablet pre-ipad, etc.) but I don't think I know of anything they made that really grew up off the top of my head.

I didn't want to say this without doing a little bit of homework so I checked their Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research) which doesn't list any accomplishments, just claims they have a lot of patents, and their main site has a publication index (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/?) but publication is not a good metric for ever seeing use.

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Back in 2014 for the release of Kinect Sports Rivals, the tech to scan people and extract their body details into the right face shapes to match them with a virtual avatar. That came from MS Research Cambridge as far as I know.

Here is a video of it demo'd: https://youtu.be/YKkULaN7J9o

There are several examples. F# came from Microsoft Research and has also fed into C#. Also, Haskell.

Note that it does research and not R&D. You aren't going to get products from research but rather technology advancements that then get incorporated. That happens a lot, and they obviously publish a lot.

Fwiw, Haskell is not from Microsoft Research.

The Haskell 1.0 specification was published before Microsoft Research existed at all.

(I worked briefly on a Haskell compiler in those days.)

Read or watch something about how flight simulator was built, as an example

> Does much actually make it out of MS Research?

Nope. Microsoft Research has some luminaries such as Leslie Lamport, Christopher Bishop, Xuedong Huang and others, but as far as actual research output that has been commercialized, there is not much to show off.

> there is not much to show off

Except a 2.8 trillion dollar valuation at the top of the biggest stock market in the world.

Is Simon Peyton Jones still at Microsoft? He is is at Epic Games now IIRC. Lennart Poettering is there though last i heard.

Oh yeah I didn't mean to imply the people there never produce anything that gets widely used in their whole careers, I'm specifically asking if it ever happens while they are at MS Research.

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