[ktharavaad]

While M$ does buy up many companies, a lot of fascinating original research goes on there too and they have a huge research division. I'm not sure if this is completely related but you can take a look at some of these papers published by Paul Viola regarding research done at Microsoft on ink group recognition and content parsing.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/

(scroll down)

Dr. Paul Viola is also the guy created the first realtime face detector ( the one in openCV ).

[eru]

Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell/GHC fame) works for Microsoft Research, too.

[wglb]

As does Tony Hoare, apparently.