Head of MS Research On Special Projects, Google X and Win 9

Velcroman1 (1667895) writes "Microsoft Research finally earned some long-overdue headlines last week, when ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported on a 'Special Projects' group that would tackle disruptive technology and ultimately Google X. Peter Lee, head of the division and its 1,100 researchers, told Digital Trends he's not frustrated by all of that glowing press for Google's researchers and the lack of attention for MSR. 'Frustrating is not quite the right word,' Lee said, in an interview ahead of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for MSR's New York City office. 'I like Google X. The people there are good friends of mine. Astro [Teller, "Captain of Moonshots" with Google X] took classes from me at Carnegie Mellon, he's a great guy doing great stuff. But the missions are different. We want to make things better and ship them. That will always be primary for us. It will be secondary for them.'"

Re:Well, ship them then.

[Anonymous Coward]

MSR have been responsible for a lot of advancements in graphics technologies (and not just in their own products). They have also done a heap around voice recognition and natural language. Then you have all the visual studio stuff they have contributed. I am sure if you go to the MSR website you will find a ton more, those are just the areas I am personally aware of.

Transformative.

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

transform
verb [ with obj. ]
1: make a marked change in the form, nature, or appearance of

98, XP, and 7 were not transformative. Hell, they were all just minor changes from their prior releases:

98 = 95 with IE stuck on
XP = 2000 with Luna stuck on
7 = Vista with a haircut

If anything, the versions you're calling shit - even though I agree they were shit - were much more transformational:

95 = Transformational jump from 3.x.
(Me was shit and pointless, yes. Utterly a stopgap between 98 and XP, because 2000 was never pushed as a consumer release.)
Vista = Transformative, but a mess. By the time 7 was released, the UAC and signed driver mess has been cleaned up.

If anything, 2000 (which you didn't actually mention) took NT and made it consumer/mainstream compatible with plug and play, USB, et al. (As mentioned above, XP was just this with the grotesque Luna. Of course, mentioning 2000 breaks your 'every other version of Windows is good' statement.

Re:Is this the team that...

[TheRaven64]

How on earth did this get moderated insightful? MSR is not the Microsoft UI group, it is a well respected research organisation. If you actually want to know what they're working on, pick up the proceedings of pretty much any top tier computer science conference and you'll see a couple of papers from them.