[ranran876]

I can't think of anything from Microsoft Research that has translated into an actual product (other than maybe the Kinect.. though I think a lot of that IP was bought). They do some neat stuff I guess, but it seems like a giant money sink. Can anyone prove my wrong?

As an aside, I had a professor from the MS Research lab in Santa Barbara who was a complete moron. Seemed like he was some kind of middle manager at MS and then went to Research for an early semi-retirement

[kvb]

Tons of stuff has been productized in various forms. .NET generics, for instance, were initially developed in MSR Cambridge. MSR research has contributed to speech recognition, search technologies in Bing, Excel's Flash Fill, SQL Server's Hekaton in-memory architecture, and many other products.

[Someone1234]

Those and thousands more listed here:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-US/about/techtransfer/defa...

Just click the years on the sidebar.

[gradstudent]

There was a bunch of great Algorithmics research coming from Andrew Goldberg's group at MSR SV. I expect the fruits of their labour are implemented in Bing Maps.