Microsoft Exec Opens Up About Research Lab Closure, Layoffs 55
alphadogg writes It's been a bit over a month since Microsoft shuttered its Microsoft Research lab in Silicon Valley as part of the company's broader restructuring that will include 18,000 layoffs. This week, Harry Shum, Microsoft EVP of Technology & Research, posted what he termed an "open letter to the academic research community" on the company's research blog. In the post, Shum is suitably contrite about the painful job cut decisions that were made in closing the lab, which opened in 2001. He also stresses that Microsoft will continue to invest in and value "fundamental research".
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Thats fine.
I for one wouldn't want any Microsoft products even if they were giving them away.
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That's fine if the products services are not something you personally find useful or enjoyable, of-course that's not fine for all those people that are fired and who will be fired in the future and it's not fine for those who actually want to use MS products (I suppose there people in that group as well) and it's obviously not fine for the general state of USA economy, as MS is just a symptom of a much larger trend. It's not fine for USA trade imbalance for example.
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Hey I'm all for the free market economy. I know Microsoft unfortunately won't ever just gio bust and die but if they did:
* Lots of other smaller companies and innovative startups that Microsoft are actively keeping down will now get a shot at a more level marketplace.
* A massive patent portfolio would open up thus removing a very large damping effect currently in place around the entire sofware industry.
* Software tech especially OS's will probably suddenly make a noticeable leap forward (for the above reas
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I think it would actually be good for both Linux and OSX.
I also think people would move on from office fairly quickly if they ever got to actually experience anything else.
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State and ideology don't make research labs productive or unproductive. Work ethic, institutional design, budget, and recruiting practices do.
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Really? Kind of funny since IBM was directly selling the Nazis punch-card tabulation machines and other tech to make their extermination of the Jews more efficient.
Henry Ford was also an ardent Nazi supporter.
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It's only socialist if you're very poor or in the top 1%. The rest of us are clearly the enemy.
Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a load of bull. Just about every company that's had significant research institutions and has closed them down has suffered long-term from that choice. Xerox, Bell, IBM, and several others in telecom/computing alone have done this and suffered the consequences.
Fundamental research is what drives long-term profit. Sure, it costs money. But it also produces patentable products that can revolutionize the market and allow the company to profit from patent licensing even when they aren't interested in the market that the patent would apply to. Get rid of the research and the company's products go stale over time, no new ideas, rehashing of existing ones to the point that someone with new innovation comes along and steals away all of the customers. Short-term it might make more profit, but long term it's like selling one's investments for cash.
This is a terrible mistake for Microsoft.
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But it also produces patentable products that can revolutionize the market and allow the company to profit from patent licensing even when they aren't interested in the market that the patent would apply to.
I know that Microsoft makes a shitload of patent fees from Android devices. Were those patents researched at Microsoft labs?
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, Microsoft is making more profit off Android than they are off their own phones.
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Samsung is cool with that since they haven't challenged Microsoft. The bottom line of the cost-benefit analysis says go ahead and pay the Redmond tax, obviously. The offering from Google is free, and their own operating system never got any traction.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Informative)
Short-term it might make more profit, but long term it's like selling one's investments for cash.
This is a terrible mistake for Microsoft.
Yes, but not for the people running it.
By the time the brain drain has it's long term effects, the executives will have jumped away, in come cases into retirement, with their golden parachutes. It's only the long-term investors and loyal employees who will have to deal with how it ruins the company.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft is flagging, I actually don't think it's lack of research, in their case. They are way out in front of every movement in industry (hence the patent fees), what they lack is the design and marketing to capitalize on it themselves.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I do have to bring something up. One of Microsoft's most lucrative patents is for FAT32. One of the reasons they're making so much money off FAT32 patents is because some genius standardizing SD flash cards put in a requirement that all SD cards use FAT32 ("genius" may or may not be sarcastic). Thus anyone who wants to include a SD card reader, including microSD cards, must license the patents from Microsoft.
However, the tides may be changing after Alice vs. CLS. Those FAT32 patents may not be valid anymore. In which case, Microsoft is about to lose a fairly large revenue stream.
I don't disagree that they are still fairly research-heavy, and that it's a good thing. The problem I see is that their business side (marketing, sales, etc.) has a history killing all the cool stuff that's coming out of their engineering side (including research). This closure may be symptomatic of a continuance of that culture under the new CEO, or it may not. Without intricate knowledge of the internal politics at play (because it's Microsoft and there's always politics at play there), it's hard to say for certain either way.
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The problem I see is that their business side (marketing, sales, etc.) has a history killing all the cool stuff that's coming out of their engineering side (including research).
I spent 10 years working for Microsoft and I can tell you that in 90% of cases it is engineering and not marketing or sales who is responsible for killing cool projects.
To understand Microsoft you must realize it is not a large monolithic company, but an aggregation of fiefdoms. And each one of them is extremely protective of its own turf. Therefore the Office group will do everything it can to kill any initiative that could threaten their business. The Windows group will kill any project that would attempt
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I thought it was VFAT that had the patents that Microsoft was asserting, not FAT32. FAT32 has nothing new or novel in comparison to FAT16, whereas the techniques in VFAT (the short/long filenaming hybrid) at least is an interesting idea.
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While true that only works if you do something with that research. Msft research designed some cool things, that would
have drastically changed tech. The problem is Microsoft never capitalized on those projects. !Microsoft was driven by marketing ( see longhorn feature list).
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Did you miss the part where the layoffs amount to approximately 50 people out of an existing pool of > 1000 researchers?
In other words, Microsoft laid off about 5% of its research staff, and the other 95% remains intact.
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Not really.
Somebody has to do fundamental research, but then they have to have big coffers to defend those patents in court -- big companies can win the war whilst losing every battle, like Sony did versus the makers of Bleem. Sony lost in court but Bleem went out of business in the meantime, and the employees scattered, some working for Sony anyhow.
Similarly, if you want to advance anything nowadays, you have to be working for a company that is already successful, and if you can do your job and find time f
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I'm starting to think the only people they used for their focus groups were obese old people with bad vision.
Hey! I happen to be an obese old person with bad vision, you insensitive clod!
And no, I wouldn't want all-caps Menus. That actually reduces readability.
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Microsoft Research isn't closed - just one lab (Score:3)
There are still 11 labs world-wide, and 5 of them are in the USA. http://research.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
I suspect Silicon Valley is just a VERY high-cost location, and I know I wouldn't work there without 3x what I make now working in the midwest.
You can work remotely, you know...
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Is it the closure of research labs that caused those companies to decline, or was it because the companies had started to decline that the shut down the research labs?
As a person in corporate research & developmen (Score:2, Informative)
I would like to thank the broad computing research community which has taken the time to share its thoughts and concerns about the recent closure of our research lab in Silicon Valley.
Translation: thanks, you guys are typical academic opinionated armchair quarterbacks...
I share with all of you a strong belief in the value of fundamental research and its importance for the long-term viability of our company, our industry and our society, and want to reassure you of Microsoft’s commitment to fundamenta
The wave of the near future (Score:1)
MS does not need to spend anything on R&D. They simply allow other companies to take the expense and the risk, then buy them out.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Profit.
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Or in the case of Doublespace/Drivespace, they let Stac Electronics do all the heavy lifting, then just walk all over their patents.
I think a lot of the SVC people laid off... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a lot of the SVC people laid off were people working on Microsoft Products for Apple. Mountain View, at the facility South of the I-101/I-85 interchange, near Moffett Field, were there to do work on Mac OS X products. I you look at the Microsoft job postings, you'll see that almost everyone in APEX is a continuing engineer, and that there are a small number of Objective-C and iOS openings that all appear to be concentrated on front-ending Office 365 on Mac OS X and iPhone, iPod, and iPad, rather than native applications.
I expect this is the non-announcement that Office 2014 for Apple products is going to be nothing more than a front-end wrapper for their subscription products. This somewhat makes sense, given that Apple has been pressuring them on productivity apps on their platforms, and that "good enough" is the enemy of "expensive". If you couple this with Mac OS X *never* having been a tier 1 platform for Office products (where's VB 5, VB.Net, Acces, etc. for Mac OS X?), it was never intended that Apple desktop systems be able to compete with Windows desktop systems in terms of being able to do the same vertical market development using ports from Windows vertical market development. It was an avoidance of cannibalizing the Windows market in that area.
Obviously, I could be wrong, but when working at Apple, I visited the Office developers there several times to deal with OS and kernel related issues; the only place they seem to be willing to hire Objective-C people seems to be Redmond or Bellevue, and it appears to be for things like Skype development, not office; the APEX jobs appear to be remaining in Mountain View at present, and greatly scaled back.
Research for what? (Score:2)
Microsoft is run by marketing alone. Research has no place there as it will never be able to influence any decisions.