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by adulau 5554 days ago
There is an interesting point-of-view in the comments:

"Microsoft is different because it is a monopoly-supported research lab. The old Bell Labs had a monopoly underneath it to support it: costs AT*T incurred to run it could be charged back to consumers. In this case, the monopoly is windows/office, but that will slowly fade. So my belief is MSR will eventually go down this road, it just may take 10 or 20 years. Some friends of mine there also believe this."

In the past years, I have seen different research works funded by Microsoft Research where is notoriously difficult to use other technologies (e.g. based on FLOSS) than the one distributed by Microsoft. It seems to be a limitation factor to innovation or research because you restrict yourself to an existing technology or product line. Is this still research?
2 comments
gaius 5554 days ago
MSR probably paid for itself with ClearType alone.

But that is a foolish comment; AT&T really was a monopoly, it had the government enforcing that on its behalf. It was effectively a branch of the civil service and its lab an academic department. Windows/Office cash-cow is really no different from IBM's mainframe cash-cow. They're in a dominant market position, sure, they're cash-generative, sure, but if they don't do research, their position becomes ever more uncertain.

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metageek 5554 days ago
>AT&T really was a monopoly, it had the government enforcing that on its behalf.

And weren't its tariffs generally set to allow it a certain profit margin? In that sort of setup, the decision to fund a big, expensive research lab is a no-brainer: you're guaranteed not to lose money in the short run, and the lab will probably make you money in the long run.

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JoachimSchipper 5554 days ago
On your FLOSS comment: the agreement for a MSR PhD grant is very clear about "absolutely no GPL ever". But that's it. It's not hard to find MSR research into, say, OpenSSL running on Linux.

(Similarly, they demand a free license to any patent that comes out of your work, but the patent is still yours/your university's. I've heard rumours of worse contracts, but this one was just about being able to use the results of your work.)

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