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Comment by liftthatback | Hacker News Reader

You are very, very mistaken.

Microsoft sponsors many top people in computer science and allows them to spend time on pure research and to publish academic papers. Ever heard of Simon Peyton Jones or Sir Tony Hoare?

How can that be bad?

For example, Microsoft pays most of the top Haskell developers to research and develop Haskell. There's no patents on that, and the source code and papers are all freely available. Microsoft isn't turning it into a product, it's just doing it to better computer science, to increase their standing, and to inform their other products such as C#.

And you say that's bad? Fuck you.

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>And you say that's bad? Fuck you.

I seriously hope you are a teenager. Because if you're an adult and you talk to people like that ... well then good luck in life man ...

It's incredible that people are downvoting you for pointing out a legitimate problem with his post. But hey, I guess even supposedly-intelligent HN readers cheer-lead in debates.

Here at hacker news your point is completely irrelevant. All we care about is the tone of your post and, of course, your grammar.

Solved the meaning of life but posted it with speeling errers? We do still keep a few roadside crosses and nails laying around from old Rome; you'll get your comeuppance.

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I see that you're new here. Please remain civil. This is not Reddit.

It is true that a portion of the research sponsored by Microsoft is published as academic papers, but I'd suspect that, in relation to the vast amount of money Microsoft is spending on R&D, those papers represent less than 1% of the results. We never hear about the hundreds of millions spent where the results never saw the light of day.

My problem with what you've said is that you've accused Microsoft of placing patents on their research, and of not publishing their results.

These accusations are false. MSR does not generally patent their work. I'm in language research and have not encountered any of their work that they've patented. Also, MSR's researchers and evaluated and appraised based on their publication record, so the only incentive is to publish. Microsoft's people publish a huge amount. Most university researchers are envious of how much they manage to publish, which they achieve through very high quality people, properly compensated, with lots of resources and being left alone.

Why do you "suspect" that only 1% is published? Where do you get that number from? Have you worked there? Have you collaborated with them? If they're only publishing 1%, the research would be superhuman.

You have put a false accusation to a group of people, and that pisses me off. It's not even like it's a difference of opinion - you've clearly not worked with these people or studied their publications, and are just making assumptions.

I went to UW for my undergrad. I know people who work in MSR and talk to them on a regular basis. You're definitely right about them being high quality people and being very properly compensated, but wrong about everything else you said. Language research, for example, constitutes a tiny minority of MSR's total budget. Most of it goes to graphics and multimedia, hardware and devices, and human-computer interaction, with smaller portions going to software development and security/anti-piracy research. Everything else is breadcrumbs.

>>If they're only publishing 1%, the research would be superhuman.

Well yes, they spend over $10 billion on research. Of course it is superhuman. Perhaps you are lacking this context, which is why you find it hard to believe my suspicion that they publish a tiny percentage of all research findings.

When I look through MSR's papers, I see a pretty massive level of output, across many of the domains you say get most of the money. Of course there's going to be information that isn't published. There's lots of information not worth publishing.

As a matter of defense against patents, though, MSFT has a strong interest in insuring that its basic research is thoroughly documented in public, establishing prior art.

MSR does in fact file quite a few patent applications. At least in the past, Microsoft employees got little tchotchkes for each patent application filed, and it's not uncommon for MSR researchers to have small mounds of these patent 'cubes' on their bookshelves.

True, but as percentage of their academic output (papers, talks, prototypes, ...) they're not so high.

In my view this is one of the things people in this discussion are not realizing. Microsoft Research is not R&D, it's R. The rest of MS spends a lot in R&D too, but MSR's work and goals are distinct.

Of course transferring tech into products is part of their goal, but it's the product teams that continue from there (R passes the ball to R&D).

Regarding publications, as other pointed out in this thread, MSR does publish a huge percentage of their work.

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