Between research, products, and the corporate bottom line.

Reading this Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, How Microsoft Plans to Beat Google & Facebook to the Next Tech Breakthrough yesterday got me thinking about Microsoft Research.

For years, I have admired Microsoft Research, especially when it was run by Rick Rashid.

Their mission then, seemed to conduct bleeding-edge research aimed at improving computing as a whole.

They were (are?) impressively resourced, with bullions poured into their endeavors.

And boy, did they deliver!

The sheer amount of patents and really wowing inventions an innovations created at and by Microsoft Research were just amazing.

However, as time went on, it seemed to me at outside perch, that all Microsoft Research seemed to be doing, was compete with IBM (and a Japanese firm I cannot readily identify right now) for the incredibly useless crown of most patents awarded for the calendar year.

The most shocking thing about their research was that there didn’t seem to be a nexus to actual shipping products, or worse yet, leading to breakthrough products.

Worse yet, none of the reported research seemed to have delivered a true moonshot!

A read of the article above shows how Satya Nadella’s Microsoft is making their research labs pivot from these inventions that bring nothing to the company’s bottom line, into a BU that creates innovations and inventions that help current products, deliver new ones, and maybe someday, drop a moonshot that truly stuns.

That, is ‘A Good Thing’.

And I can’t wait.

© 2002 – 2016, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited

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