[derekchiang]

Not sure why you seem to think researchers are flowing to Google. Microsoft Research is still the biggest name in distributed systems, if not CS in general. They have been consistently producing high-quality papers [1].

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

[mehrdada]

I do believe there is a flow of Systems researchers towards Google, at least from academia, if not Microsoft Research. I

Microsoft Research is active in many more areas of research than Google. However, I'm not sure that implies they are better than Google in the specific area of distributed systems research. FWIW, it seems every now and then Google publishes incredible papers that surprises folks in that community.