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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

I'll grant you that my personal anecdote is a few years old, but...

Maybe 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to the Dean of the University of Colorado Comp Sci department. I could only remember Benjamin Zorn as a faculty member, so I dropped the name. By then, Zorn had gotten hired away to Microsoft R&D. The Dean of the Comp Sci department made a number of references to Microsoft R&D as a "research roach hotel" - researcher's go in, but no papers ever come out.

If Microsoft R&D is a secret, then it's Microsoft's own problem, I assume.

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Here you will find 10,000 publications from Microsoft Research:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pu...

That appears to be about four orders of magnitude more research than that used to fact check your story.

I look forward to reading http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1795... this one about Halo combat skill development:

Using these ratings from 7 months of games from over 3 million players, we look at how play intensity, breaks in play, skill change over time, and other titles affect skill.

At least in the area of programming languages this could not be further from the truth - papers from MSR are a significant portion of every year's POPL and PLDI proceedings.

Not to mention siggraph and...sosp/osdi.

Ad publishing isn't a panacea, there are many ways we should be communicating, if anything we publish too many papers as researchers.

It'd be pretty difficult to recruit professors and researchers (whose professional careers depend on publishing papers) to do research for several years in a place where they can't publish.

MSR encourages publishing almost to a fault. They even have a portion of their legal department specifically trained to support MSR's researchers so that the "corporate" tendencies from the rest of Microsoft don't bleed into MSR.

Please check your facts.

Example of the output: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#institutions

Also look at any proceeding from conferences in areas where MSR works. Their output is pretty high (and high quality).

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