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Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

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

Oh well...

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.

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.

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