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Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

Seems like this was made by Microsoft Research. I'd argue Microsoft Research's very existence shows Microsoft is heavily invested in the future, more so than any other tech company as far as I know. Maybe besides IBM I dont know any other company that still funds research which isn't expected to have some relationship to the business side of things.

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Microsoft Research is strongly expected to have an impact on the business side of things. It just so happens that Microsoft is willing to incubate projects like Midori* that have long runways (decade+) and may completely fail. The hope is that some new emerging tech long plays will become huge business boons (Cortana, Kinect, ..). There's lots of investment in NLP, vision, and OS research over at MSR.

As far as other tech companies with large R&D budgets, look at Google. However, Google's R&D investment areas are different than MSFT's (apparently they don't do OS research): http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/20/technology/mobile/apple-rd-s...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

Is it? I suppose I just assumed it wasn't expected to have any impact on the business side of things as they are the only company (again besides IBM) that does research in theoretical computer science. Not only that but they publish all their results in public.

I know that Google also does a lot of R&D but from what I can tell, it's usually directly related to what they are doing.

Peter Norvig wrote an article "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/38149.pdf

Microsoft Research is full of very cool projects like Singularity, Drawbridge, Midori, Barrelfish, Bascule, M#, F#, F*. Also sponsoring Haskell and OCaml.

And these are only the subjects I personally care about.

.NET compilation to native code via MDIL (Windows 8) and .NET Native, F#, Windows containers are some examples of work that started at Microsoft Research.

They do so because all serious researchers will want to publish, as part of their career building process. Therefore I can't understand what type of researcher would want to work for a more closed company like e.g. Apple.

One who doesn't want to deal with the hassle of publishing. If you don't intend on returning to academia/other places that care about it it isn't necessary for career building.

The ones who care about building stuff in an environment that's more or less the only one of its kind, and where the definition of a successful research project isn't "we published a paper" but rather "we enabled a product that hundreds of millions of people will use more so than any other object in their life".

It might be an evolution of Microsoft Small Basic - an easy programming language for beginners with a simple IDE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Small_Basic

Any company worth its salt and isn't cash strapped would have an rnd/skunkworks arm, this has been the case since the 1900s.

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