[andreaja]

Surely it's not about who does your R&D so much as what they produce?

Most of the MS R&D papers I've read have been very good, with excellent ideas. Let's also not forget that GHC is maintained at MS R&D.

The problem lies in converting research into product. One example is the data mountain[1]. The data mountain was way before its time (3d desktop in '98, which is still struggling to make inroads), it's a bad interface for a mouse-driven UI, but a good one for a touch-driven UI (probably not on a phone, but maybe on a tablet and definitely on a 20" or larger screen). But they haven't done anything with it.

I don't think the right stuff from MS R&D is transported to the product development people, which is sad, but highlights one of the differences between Google and MS. At Google a lot of research papers are driven by actual solutions (cf. BigTable, GFS etc). At MS there's more 'pure' research going on and as a consequence the divide between the research people and the product people is larger.

That's what it looks like to me anyway. I don't think there's any problem with the quality of the research being done at MS, quite the contrary.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/dcr/work/datam... (The video sadly seems to have fallen off the web.)