Roundup of Microsoft Research At TechFest 2009 123
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a very thorough post of some of the technologies that Microsoft researchers showed off at TechFest last week. 'The exact number of projects that were demonstrated at TechFest 2009 is not clear, but here's a quick rundown of about 35 research projects that haven't received much coverage, accompanied by links that will let you further explore if your interest is piqued. Remember that these are concepts and prototypes, not finished products, and they may never end up becoming anything significant.'" While Microsoft has been criticized for squandering a fortune on R&D, there can be no doubt that they are showing off some cool tech here.
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's hoping ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that some of this research actually helps Microsoft in turning in to a company that derives its revenues from the fruits of its innovations rather than monopoly-based marketing hacks, and lock-ins into poorly written code.
Say what you will about Microsoft's software, Steve Ballmer, etc. - Microsoft Research does some really cool work, and its track record of supporting fundamental math/cs research (and researchers) is quite commendable.
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, Wall Street will say all of what they do is a waste, because it might take longer than next quarter's results.
Here's hoping that more of the R&D ends up in more of their products. I've seen some of their research stuff and their problem isn't a lack of ideas (yeah yeah yeah bear with me a moment) it's executing on those ideas and getting them in (and polished) into products.
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft ... poorly written code
How do you know its poorly written, if it is proprietary?
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft ... poorly written code
How do you know its poorly written, if it is proprietary?
Lots of ways he could have. He may be an ex-employee. He may have an academic license to view their code. He may have been offered a job by them and given a chance to see the code first (I know someone who had this happen to them). He may have looked at leaked code. He may have looked at code they released (especially after there was a bug in it and MS wanted to show the cause to the IT community at large). He may know second-hand.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
"Well, Wall Street will say all of what they do is a waste, because it might take longer than next quarter's results."
And now you see why we have the Great Economic Tsunami of 2008.
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:5, Insightful)
the research products almost never make it to real products that people can use
You could say the same for just about any real research. I'm still grateful that it's being done. Far too many companies are content to focus on the next quarter while leaving the research to academia.
Re:Most Interesting From Conference (Score:3, Insightful)
The most interesting thing I saw is Social Desktop. Admittedly a basic idea, but oh, the power you can leverage off that... For example you could make a universal file system that you can access anywhere on top of that. It's huge.
Universal filesystem? We already got one of those. They call it FTP. It's quite nice really. You can use part or all of anyone else's filesystem with standard protocols so that means you don't need to know the details of the filesystem on that person's hard drive. Then there's NFS if you want to worry about the details of the remote filesystem. Did I mention SFTP/SCP?
It's quite rare that someone who is really impressed with a "new" technology (more like a new brand) and thinks it's HUGE and this-and-that is actually talking about something novel. Really rare. It's just trendy these days for anything using the Internet to be "social".
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that is because every single product they release commercially, they will try to use as a vehicle for their other stuff (for best or (usually) for worst). Windows 98 was a vehicle for their ad-based "channels" and the MSN network (a non-neutral internet of some sorts), .NET was initially a vehicle for VB and Visual Studio, later morphed being a vehicle for IIS (and subsequently Windows Server). The MSN portal instead of being informative has become a vehicle for all types of things including Microsoft Search, Messenger, Hotmail, MySpace and Facebook knockoffs, ...
Same goes for their desktop software (Office, CRM) and server systems (AD, Communications Server and Sharepoint), they all lead to some type of vendor lock-in or it won't work well. Good for us, bad for them these days others begin to see the need to be open and they missed the train.
Imitation (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure we would all be singing a different tune if MS had launched the Zune back in 2000, or if Live/MSN search had the clean, easy to use, and optimized search engine before Google, but MS didn't launch them so to most customers they look about as appealing as buying a Wal-Mart branded MP3 player when a name-brand iPod costs only a few bucks more. Sure, some will buy them, but they will see them as the "off-brand" something that I don't think MS quite realizes. The MS brand means nothing to consumers, the days where it was considered name-brand are long gone.
Re:Recognizing Characters Written in the Air ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Apparently you didn't even read the summary right under the video. It can be used in education via webcam, where the user may not be familier with a keyboard, but still needs to input words. This could spill over to places like kiosks or embedded systems, where a keyboard is a liability towards being broken, or simply a cuttable expense. It could also work with other niches, such as providing feedback on teaching sign language, or letting a player use hand signals to communicate in squad-based shooting games.
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't seen a BSOD on my computer for many years, at work where I use Windows exclusively as well as at home, where my Mac is often tortured by running Windows on it for playing games. XP is very stable.
It's a huge waste because nothing comes from it (Score:4, Insightful)
Some might say that some of what they do is a waste, but there aren't many companies that are able to do such large scale R&D.
But that's why it is a huge waste. Not because they do it, but because they can do all this awesome R&D and yet we (the human race) really see nothing from it.
What it derives from is the fundamental reason why Microsoft funds all this R&D - to keep the people doing the R&D happy in the current-day equivalent of the Holodeck, where they can do anything they want yet nothing they do actually matters. Microsoft doesn't care, as long as what they are doing does not help other companies progress then Microsoft looks like they are not moving as slowly as they are by comparison.
It's easy to see how a situation like this can come to pass when a company has a lot of money, the directive to hire and retain smart people, yet has a corporate culture that makes bringing real products to full delivery almost impossible.
And that in the end, is the greatest crime of all. The opportunity cost of what we all have lost from these people slaving away in the golden tower from which nothing returns.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right that they've made many fuckups but you've only taking a select set of their products that are fuckups and tried to infer from that that all their products are fuckups.
Visual Studio, .NET and most of their other development stuff is excellent and truly top notch arguably beating out everything else on the market that tries to achieve the same goal. You look at something like ASP.NET MVC which started out as a research project and is now nearly at release stage and it puts a lot of longer running open source web frameworks (such as CakePHP) to absolute shame.
A lot of people don't like the Office 2007 interface because it's different and people don't like different, but in terms of ease of use for beginners and the productivity increases it brings it's a major innovation. The previous style toolbars have been running since the 80s and absolutely were not perfect so they deserve some credit for finally doing something to improve the good old toolbar in a way that does produce real, measureable productivity increases. Some common tasks that used to take an hour can be done in 30 seconds now. Sure the OOXML thing was a farce but that doesn't make the whole product bad when the new UI offers real benefits and you can save in other file formats anyway.
Even their server products aren't that bad anymore since they figured out that stability and security were important. 2008 server is particularly decent and 2003 wasn't too bad.
Also, you include forcing silverlight on everybody as being something that makes it a bad product, now I'll admit I don't know what silverlight is really like but businesses practices aside is it really any worse than Flash for example? The Yahoo thing ended up in Microsofts favour, Yahoo reached a point where it wished it had accepted Microsoft's offer whilst Microsoft ended up thanking the gods it didn't pay what it was offering.
Microsoft has indeed produced some shit through the years- the Zune, IE6, ME, Vista, Sourcesafe etc. but to suggest all their products are fucked up at implementation is ignorant of their numerous successes. I do not believe a company even with a monopoly the size of Micrososft's could continue to survive if everything they did was fucked up at implementation. People say companies buy MS OS' because of the monopoly position which is pretty true, but they hold no monopoly on development tools, office software and so on, they don't bundle this software with the OS, they charge for it and yet people buy it primarily because it's really no worse than the other offerings out there and is in many ways, much better.
I do not see Microsoft any different to other companies in this regard- Apple has it's successes like the iPod, iTunes and so on but look how many flops it's had through the years too. Google has it's search engine, web office tools and so on but again look at the flops it's had and the projects it's scrapped. All companies have succeses as well as failures and Microsoft is really no different in this regard, even if it is popular to hate them for their monopoly. Perhaps the biggest difference with MS is that most it's successes are in the business world whilst most it's failures are often more prominent in the consumer world- the Zune, IE6, ME and as such they struggle more for hearts and minds than say Apple and Google whose successes are prominent more in the consumer world- I mean, everyone remembers Apple for the iPod and no one remembers them for the pile of steaming turd that is MacOS Server whilst everyone remembers Microsoft for the likes of the Zune and Windows ME and no one (apart from developers who work with it) remembers them for Visual Studio.
Re:Good for them (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft has indeed produced some shit through the years- the Zune, IE6
IE6 is not a good example. It was actually a top-notch browser in its time -- it's what finally killed Netscape. It's just that after Microsoft dominated the web browser market, it stopped adding useful features and got trounced by others.
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)
IE6 was bad because it was one of the least standards compliant browsers we've ever had to suffer in the mainstream and also one of the least secure.
It was not less standards compliant nor less secure than its competition at the time it was released. It grew into the monstrosity we know and hate due to neglect, not because it was poorly executed to begin with. It was good, but the competition got better while it stayed put.