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.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
it's executing on those ideas and getting them in (and polished) into products.
I don't think so. I'll give them the X-Box, but everything else they've implemented since they started trying to eat everybody else's lunch.
Their search efforts. The SCO fiasco. The desperate grab for yahoo and blatantly paying people off to force Silverlight on everybody. The shit-colored Zune. Vista.
But what did it for me was the recent forcing of social networking horseshit onto Hotmail without a clear, easy, and permanent method to disable it. Say what you want about Hotmail being Microsoft and all, but I had that account for 10 years because Hotmail Just Worked(tm). I just cancelled a 10-year Hotmail account and left to Gmail a few days ago because Microsoft thought that it would be cute to splice their own(poorly-implemented, I might add) version of MySpace into my goddamn e-mail account.
So no, I disagree with you. In fact I believe just about everything they do develop, no matter how ingenious, is always fucked up at the implementation stage.
Most Interesting From Conference (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, I actually played around with it first. To "add" people requires you to type in your information to confirm that Microsoft permanently owns all content related to your social networking a la Facebook, but since they're polite enough to ask for that, then why not ask me if I wanted all that crap in the first place?!
It's like going to the restroom and unexpectedly finding your longtime neighbor who asks if he can watch you shower and take a dump. Even if he leaves after you tell him no, he shouldn't have been there in the first place. And you're never going to trust him again.
The death of my 10-year old Hotmail account is symbolic. The rebirth will be my gmail accounts accessed via Thunderbird installed on a Dell with pre-loaded Ubuntu that I'm going to buy next week. Hotmail always charged extra for SMTP. You know, I kinda like Microsoft. I like XP, and I want to see Surface succeed, But they're really digging their own grave and even the most diehard of Microsoft apologists know that.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Ballmer, Feb 2009: Microsoft asked some of its employees to read various company annual reports from 1927 through 1938. The goal, he said, was to find out who had done a good job handling the Great Depression," Lane reports. "'RCA, god rest them in peace, RCA become our role model,' Ballmer said. 'They actually kept investing in R&D through the Depression period, and in the post-Depression they dominated TV technology because they were really the only guys who had invested.'" (http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=12000B3128U0)
Steve Jobs, March 2008: We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time. (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/15.html) R&D is HUGE. Without it, I'd doubt the iPod would have made such a big splash, or if we'd see any of the amazing processor iterations that we're currently seeing.
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That sounds swell, but denying users with nearly two decades of experience selecting commands in the old menu system via muscle memory ("It's over here...") the ability to continue their ways is not just stupid, it's arrogant. In the old days when Excel was trying to take over from Lotus 1-2-3, Excel actually incorporated the option to use the 1-2-3 keystrokes to make transitions easier. The same happened with Word when it included WordPerfect's options. But now that Word rules the roost? No compromise, no need to make things easy.
I worked in a government agency that had been updated to Office 2007 and the entire staff was slowed trying to figure out how to use their old features unless they had memorized the key commands. (And how many workers really learn more key commands than than cut, copy, paste, print, and save?) That's a couple of hundred people wasting taxpayer time trying to figure out stuff like how to do a Save As. You want to explain to them that the reason why they can't get things done is because Microsoft, who has the monopoly on a mature industry, suddenly decided to worry about people who has never used its products and toss everyone else under the bus?
Don't get me wrong, some things about the ribbon were nice. However, denying the ability to have classic menus was an asshole move that alienated a lot of users.
Re:No you idiot, you utterly miss my point (Score:3, Interesting)
Great arguing style, you've got there.
What you are ignoring is that MS researchers publish in journals and conference proceedings accessible to any library and frequently they are on-line for anyone. How is this then mysteriously lost?
What you are objecting to is MS development (not research) never seeing the light of day. I doubt that, I'll bet most of their development goes into small things that go into their OS and other associated malware. It probably won't fix the stinking blob that is Windows, or what their marketing dept. has delivered.
I don't believe you understand research. I think that you think of the fruits of research as being big paradigm changing widgets. Most research, regardless of where its done, is not.
1s44c does have a point that MS seems to buy researchers to keep them away from other companies. However, I think that is mitigated somewhat by them publishing in journals and conference proceedings. MS must believe they get some secret sauce by owning them, but if that were the case, they wouldn't be encouraged to publish.
Gerry
MSR dominates SIGGRAPH (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad thing is I see so little of this research making it in main stream MSFT commercial products. I hear from mainstream MSFT developers of a cultural rift between them and the "effete research snobs". Stockholders are starting to grumble about the drain of multi-billion dollar research lab on company returns.