[YorkianTones]

Microsoft Research is strongly expected to have an impact on the business side of things. It just so happens that Microsoft is willing to incubate projects like Midori* that have long runways (decade+) and may completely fail. The hope is that some new emerging tech long plays will become huge business boons (Cortana, Kinect, ..). There's lots of investment in NLP, vision, and OS research over at MSR.

As far as other tech companies with large R&D budgets, look at Google. However, Google's R&D investment areas are different than MSFT's (apparently they don't do OS research): http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/20/technology/mobile/apple-rd-s...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

[rifung]

Is it? I suppose I just assumed it wasn't expected to have any impact on the business side of things as they are the only company (again besides IBM) that does research in theoretical computer science. Not only that but they publish all their results in public.

I know that Google also does a lot of R&D but from what I can tell, it's usually directly related to what they are doing.

[turingbook]

Peter Norvig wrote an article "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/38149.pdf