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Comment by jwecker | Hacker News Reader

I tried. I tried really hard. I tried to gloss over the part about one of the panels hanging. I tried to not think about licensing terms or the hard cost. I stopped myself from wondering how responsive or open the dev team would be to user input. I purposefully didn't look up whoever the company was that actually developed the software before Microsoft took it over - and I tried not to assume that that was the case.

I'm exhausted.

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While M$ does buy up many companies, a lot of fascinating original research goes on there too and they have a huge research division. I'm not sure if this is completely related but you can take a look at some of these papers published by Paul Viola regarding research done at Microsoft on ink group recognition and content parsing.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/

(scroll down)

Dr. Paul Viola is also the guy created the first realtime face detector ( the one in openCV ).

Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell/GHC fame) works for Microsoft Research, too.

As does Tony Hoare, apparently.

Actually, I'm curious, who did they buy this from? I didn't see any indication that they did.

Also, you do have to give them some credit for using a blog with open comments for their communications channel. They do read those things, so they can listen there as an example. Some credit...OK, just a tiny bit of credit.

Generally the largest problem when MS buys a company or does interesting research is the transition into MS products. The various politics in the company force the the interesting tech to make compromises to utilize existing MS products. Often these compromises clearly make the tech less interesting from an outsider's prospective. The same thing happens at most(all?) large tech companies including Google.

This is a great idea along the lines of another thing I've wanted: OCR for math formulas when scanning documents or drawings (some really good computer science documents are out of print or are unavailable in a digital, searchable form).

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