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Not sure why you seem to think researchers are flowing to Google. Microsoft Research is still the biggest name in distributed systems, if not CS in general. They have been consistently producing high-quality papers [1].

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

I do believe there is a flow of Systems researchers towards Google, at least from academia, if not Microsoft Research. I

Microsoft Research is active in many more areas of research than Google. However, I'm not sure that implies they are better than Google in the specific area of distributed systems research. FWIW, it seems every now and then Google publishes incredible papers that surprises folks in that community.

Aren't there like 4 other Turing award winners at MSR that also somehow escaped poaching (and are there any at Google)? I think you may have the wrong idea about where researchers would prefer to work...

Off the top of my head, there's at least one Turing Award winner at Google: Ken Thompson.

They have certainly successfully poached a bunch of awesome systems people from their positions in academia. I'm not sure how many from MS Research though.

Who are you thinking about who left MSR for Google?