Microsoft to Close Microsoft Research Lab in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft to Close Microsoft Research Lab in Silicon Valley

zdnet.com

133 pointsdavmre84 comments

I thought Microsoft's stated goal for these layoffs was to reduce the amount of managerial indirection, remember this catchy quote from the layoff announcement:

> fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making.

But yet the vast majority of people who have been laid off have been engineers or other "boots on the ground" types. It doesn't really sound like Microsoft is doing anything about their huge internal political debt (that makes them so inflexible and slow moving).

Plus, to me, sacking your research people is never a "good" indicator for a company. That either means that your research was entirely misguided OR that you've just given up on new innovation/first to market.

If I was a long term Microsoft shareholder I'd definitely have mixed feelings right now. On one hand Microsoft has made cost savings, but on the other hand it might be at the cost of their long term growth.

... We'll just have to wait and see how this all turns out...

The extra irony is cutting jobs and research while spending billions to buy a game franchise.

I imagine the short term ROI for Minecraft is much higher.

That isn't to say the SV team isn't doing great work that could eventually be of colossal importance... but if it can't be quantified on a spreadsheet, the bean-counters don't consider it.

I don't see any irony. This tiny layoff (~2% of the workforce) is completely unrelated to a franchise purchase to drive growth in the entertainment division. Microsoft isn't hurting, it's reorganizing.

It makes MSFT look some combination of bad/inept/stupid in Silicon Valley. Its obviously not quantifiable in the MBA fashion, but especially in Silicon Valley MSFT needs as much of a good presence as it can get, I think.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Microsoft is already considered bad/inept/stupid pretty universally in Silicon Valley, and that this doesn't change anything.

Of course they have to make this atmosphere, in order to shock young people not to go to MS.

However, there were a few Turing award winners in that lab.

Am I missing something? I don't see an indication that they will be laid off. It really doesn't make any sense to have that kind of staff in Silicon Valley anymore. In reality, it makes no sense to have people in expensive locations like Silicon Valley / SF or NYC at all.

> A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the Silicon Valley research lab is closing this Friday, and noted that an undisclosed number of those researchers will be offered jobs at other Microsoft Research labs.

That would imply that these are layoffs.

Mojang was bought with money that can't easily be repatriated. Same as Skype, which was purchased with dead money.

If rumors/leaks are true, the Skype investment was going to be rewarded by 3 letter agencies via contracts and who knows what else.

I think 8.5 billion dollars of extra work is very hard to award. I think there are very few people if any people in the U.S. government who could credibly promise to award 8.5 billion dollars of work which Microsoft could bid on.

This is still overseas cash, for which it otherwise doesn't have much use. What's it doing with its spare US cash, which is real money? It's using it to buy back its own shares.

Buying Skype, Nokia and Minecraft is gambling, but what are the odds that one of these will ultimately move the share price more than buying back a few shares?

That game franchise will generate more revenue and employ more people than the purchase price. It'll be a real cash cow.

Microsoft would have to sell 92,592,592 copies of minecraft to break even. So far, 16,730,534 have been sold.

That's just PC sales. In April this year XBox 360 sales reached 12M and PS3 sales were 1.5M.

That aside, the real money is in merchandising and tie-ups

Minecraft also makes more on merchandising sales than software sales.

Half the under-13s in the country have or will have a Minecraft t-shirt, lunchbox and/or action figure. The game revenue is a small part of it. If you have kids you probably know the mindshare this game has. It's bigger than any video game I remember.

It'd be interesting to see Microsoft make Minecraft a free addition to every licensed copy of Windows.

Not all research is ground breaking and sometimes you really do have to pivot. Any long term shareholder is probably happy since it cuts cost.

I think you misunderstand how large multinationals work.

They are good at product sales, they are bad at innovation. The layers of bureaucracy required by so many employees makes decision making hard.

The modern model is that companies as large as Microsoft will just buy smaller more innovative companies to leverage that loss of product research.

To be fair its a model that works really well.

I see that this is being spun as part of the larger layoffs at Microsoft in general, but make no mistake, this is highly unusual for an institution as distinguished and well respected as Microsoft Research (both internally at Microsoft, and externally amongst academia in general)

I think there is much more under the surface than is visible here. We'll have to wait for the official PR story from Microsoft (which I'm sure will clarify nothing at all). But for now I remain puzzled at this move.

This isn't their only lab location though. Microsoft Research isn't going away, just what's probably one of their more expensive locations.

Yeah, as quoted in the article, a "Microsoft spokesperson" said they were consolidating west coast labs, and before that, a sign that they don't want to lose some of these people:

"[Confirms the report] and noted that an undisclosed number of those researchers will be offered jobs at other Microsoft Research labs."

I think there's something intangible though, about having some research presence in the middle of Silicon Valley.

The 'intangibles' you speak of are housing and money.

I imagine it's tough to be a small division away from the mothership in Seattle. If they aren't constantly making their presence and existence known it's probably easy for execs to write them off as not performing.

MSR Silicon Valley is a satellite office, smaller than Redmond, Cambridge, Beijing, and probably several others. Still, it employs (employed?) some heavy hitters, including Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport. Many of these people will probably receive offers to relocate, per the article, but presumably not everyone wants to move to Redmond, hence the existence of the SV lab in the first place. So some will leave Microsoft and seek jobs elsewhere, as will all the researchers that don't receive relocation offers.

As some of my grad student friends have observed, this may be a tough year to be on the academic/research job market...

> including Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport

I can think of one or two companies in the Silicon Valley who are salivating at the idea of hiring the pioneer of distributed systems.

Possibly one of those companies down the road from MSR SV with the multicolored bikes.

You mean the inventor of LaTeX. And by "mean", I mean "also".

You also the inventor of LaTex?

These layoffs remind me of when Yahoo did the same with Yahoo Research. You know what happened next... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-google-hiring-re...

I think he'd consider retiring now that he's 73 yrs old..

An academic like that doesn't tend to retire, as they don't tend to be 'working' like the typical office plebe. He'd no doubt be making his own hours and effectively 'working' to satisfy his interests. Retiring is equivalent to stopping his passion.

My observation is that it tends to be the case with any industry-leading expert that they sort of transition into part-time work but pick and choose the work they do so that it isn't really 'work' to them. Holding that much clout has upsides.

Plus that kind of person can make you money just by the talent who will work with you to work with them. Also great rewards from the right question from the expert to the up-and-coming talent.

This article(http://blogs.seattletimes.com/microsoftpri0/2014/09/18/micro...) has details on the numbers. The lab has 75 researchers.

THREE Turing Award winners: Leslie Lamport, Charles Thacker, Butler Lampson (and Jim Gray, who died a few years ago when his sailboat disappeared)

Word on the street is that only six members of the research lab were offered jobs at other Microsoft Research locations...

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time ever a Microsoft Research lab is being closed? It reflects a lot on how the new CEO Nadella views fundamental (academic) research in his priority list.

Though this may be the right move for MSFT shareholders, this is certainly a backward step for computer science research as a whole. MSR is the last remaining industry lab which focuses on pure academic research, and I hope MSR remains.

I disagree with this statement. Contrarily, closing the Valley location could be an indicator Nadella holds a high value on the other world wide locations.

If your hope is to attract top global talent to work on global issues, having two labs nearly on top of each other in Santa Barbara and the Valley doesn't make much since.

Current lab locations: Redmond, WA; Cambridge, UK; Beijing, China; Munich, Germany; Bangalore, India; Santa Barbara, CA; Cairo, Egypt; Herzelia, Isreal.

> having two labs nearly on top of each other in Santa Barbara and the Valley doesn't make much sense.

I think you may be confusing Santa Barbara, which is close to Los Angeles and approximately 5 hours drive from the Valley, with the closer Santa Clara, which is in the Valley, or Santa Cruz, which is about an hour south of the Valley.

I'm just starting my sixth year at UCSB (undergrad + MS), and I never knew about this, but apparently there is an MSR office inside of UCSB's campus! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/stationq/

That said, I wasn't sure if your comment was saying they were just confused at to where Santa Barbara is located, or if there was only labs in Santa Clara, not in Santa Barbara. That said, I find it very strange to close the SV MSR office. Lot's of California-only folks who don't want to move to the tourist-city of SB/don't fit into the MSR-StationQ at UCSB now are off the market.

If you look at labs distributed world-wide then a 5 hour drive is really not that much.

Yeah, I was wondering if the parent meant this. However, the Silicon Valley is arguably the highest concentration of CS talent in the world, and the researchers from the closed office may not want to move to Seattle when they can easily get good offers from the likes of Google/FB/Dropbox!

"Right on top of" really isn't particularly accurate.

Though it's interesting to note that both locales have exceptionally high costs of living.

For general amenity, I might prefer Santa Barbara to Mountain View, but you're sacrificing some cultural access in the process. Los Angeles isn't too far away, but the traffic is absolute murder.

Don't forget NERD in Cambridge, MA.

Santa Barbara is a whole other cultural world than Silicon Valley. Its like comparing LA with the Bay Area. Maybe on a global scale they are close, but I think Silicon Valley is too important to really abandon like that. We all mock and make fun of the Valley but I don't think MSFT can really abandon Valley mindshare.

The Santa Barbara outpost is rather peculiar because it's devoted exclusively to quantum computing.

Nah, this all has to do with ValueAct Capital, which is known for vulture investment.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/11/microsoft-new-...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/net-us-microsoft-v...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/11/microsoft-appoints-valueact...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/03/valueact-...

ValueAct is known for coming in, increasing dividends, then dumping and selling parts of the company and soaking in the profits - then leaving to work on another firm.

The Ballmer 'retirement', after repeated announcements that he wouldn't retire, have everything to do with the stake that VAC bought in Microsoft.

They are a patient bunch. If you look at what they want to do with Microsoft, they want to make it an enterprise and cloud only business. They are forcing Microsoft to move away from its OS, for example, and move its services and offerings on other platforms. VAC has a history of waiting long periods of time to gut and sell off the assets of companies.

Expect them to try to sell XBox, the recently acquired Nokia, the Surface and its factories and any other such devices and the assets and infrastructure associated with them.

Sounds like a good business plan....divide & conquer!!

RnD is expensive enough as it is, wouldn't it make sense to move out of Startup Valley?

While I agree that SV is expensive, I think most people agree that the talent there is really not restricted to startups. Google, IBM Almaden Research Center, to name a few, and then there's obviously Stanford and Berkeley very close.

Most people also agree that there is a severe lack of available talent in the area and that it seems to be difficult to pull in people from out-of-area. This creates a cycle where companies hire significant numbers of people from competitors in the Valley. Perhaps MS decided that the cost of playing this game was no longer worth the benefits.

I definitely would not say that most people agree to this. Otherwise it would be very surprising to see Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung and many others growing their presence in Silicon Valley.

Microsoft still has a big office in silicon valley to do product R&D. This refers to a research lab.

My immediate assumption is that they're just moving it to Santa Barbara, where they established a facility in 2005:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/stationq/default.as...

That's not so far away; it's easy for an organization like Microsoft, with no ties to SV or need for them, to relocate when real estate becomes a problem.

MSR Station Q (at Santa Barbara) is 12 researchers. MSR SVC was about 75.

I understood most of Microsoft Research is based in Seattle.

Does this include Jaron Lanier and his team?

MS Research is the only part of the company that actually does anything truly innovative.

Oh well...

Like... inventing basically everything that Apple copies months/years later?

This is the wrong place to speak the truth :). Let me share your down-votes with you.

I understand the downvotes as a knee-jerk reaction, but the thing to understand here is that MS research is largely separate from the product development side.

Spend some time having a look at some of their publications and you'll see what i mean.

Examples

- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/barrelfish/

- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fsharp/

F# is not an MSR project anymore.

Special mention for this one also:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

Unfortunately it never went anywhere (VERY unfortunately). Also this one more recently:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/

Which might wind up being Microsoft's answer to Docker-like containers.

Singularity has evolved into Midori project but to the latest rumor it was cancelled and the team disbanded.

You do know that fsharp is a pretty big deal for Microsoft and is shipped as part of Visual Studio, one of their biggest products, right?

I don't understand why you and the other person are trying to "correct" them? I thought their point was obvious: MS Research innovates, and then links examples (including F# which goes on to be a successful product as you pointed out).

F# being in full production doesn't disprove what they said, it further proves it.

PS - I disagree with the person above's proposition that MS Research is the "only" innovate branch of Microsoft. I am just posting to get clarification on what you and the other poster are getting at.

Yeah, they don't do anything like make innovative wordpad applications for tablets.

People are confusing MSR with MSR-SV. MSR-SV is a small(er) outpost; located in SV so they can mop up some talent down here. Their biggest labs are still in Redmond, Cambridge (UK) and Beijing, I think.

That lab had three turing award winners (Leslie Lamport, Chuck Thacker, and Bob Tarjan as visiting researcher). This is how MSFT treats turing award winners now?

I wonder about the fate of the Microsoft New England R&D Center in Cambridge, MA.

It's probably still valuable for Microsoft to have an east coast presence, especially if it allows them to recruit from Boston-area tech schools, MIT especially.

Probably a smart move, if only because Microsoft was always going to have retention problems in Silicon Valley anyway.

I can only imagine who will move into the office space

hahahahahahaha

hahahahaahahahaha

I guess they already figured out all the things?

I can't think of anything from Microsoft Research that has translated into an actual product (other than maybe the Kinect.. though I think a lot of that IP was bought). They do some neat stuff I guess, but it seems like a giant money sink. Can anyone prove my wrong?

As an aside, I had a professor from the MS Research lab in Santa Barbara who was a complete moron. Seemed like he was some kind of middle manager at MS and then went to Research for an early semi-retirement

Tons of stuff has been productized in various forms. .NET generics, for instance, were initially developed in MSR Cambridge. MSR research has contributed to speech recognition, search technologies in Bing, Excel's Flash Fill, SQL Server's Hekaton in-memory architecture, and many other products.

Those and thousands more listed here:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-US/about/techtransfer/defa...

Just click the years on the sidebar.

There was a bunch of great Algorithmics research coming from Andrew Goldberg's group at MSR SV. I expect the fruits of their labour are implemented in Bing Maps.

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