The Microsoft project is technically impressive. But I think John Gruber was onto something when he wrote, "But while Microsoft was publishing research, Instagram was building an app that will soon be in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people."
My impression of Microsoft Research is that they are like PARC: doing a lot of impressive research that rarely gets turned into compelling products.
The Kinect was a big payoff from MSR. What are some others?
Kinect was something like the fastest selling accessory of all time, so you can't expect too many hits at that level. But there have certainly been many other consumer-visible successes, like Excel's flash fill or Skype's upcoming real-time translation. Then there are enterprise things that consumers may be unaware of, like SQL Server's Hekaton technology. And beyond that, there are lots of additional projects that meaningfully translate to value to Microsoft but that aren't really externally visible, like speech recognition improvements, search engine ranking techniques, datacenter networking improvements, efficient algorithms for traffic routing and prediction, etc.
Generics in the CLR are a direct result from MSR. .Net would not have the nice generics it has without them. It even came down to specific deadlines and code deliveries MSR had to make.
The same team also delivered F#, which might have a large impact on keeping .Net competitive. Not only because features trickle down into C# (like async). But also because there may be lots of people only staying on .Net due to having a good language option. (That's just my own impression. I'd personally leave .Net without F#. I'm probably overestimating the impact.)
I don't follow their product releases very closely, but I was excited about Photosynth. I feel like the underlying research has been put to use in subtle ways in various products (possibly even Kinect?). I'm not sure if Deep Zoom went anywhere, but their initial implementation leaned on Silverlight..
As a research division, they are expected to focus on long plays by developing enabling technologies. Packaging that prototype in a simple mobile app for use by hundreds of thousands of people, for free, wouldn't move the needle very much for MS as an organization.
I'm not trying to defend MS/MSR, just trying to be pragmatic. It's up to MS leadership to incorporate cutting edge research into meaningful products.
Photosynth is still around. The current version is more limited than it used to be, it only supports straight lines and circular panoramas. But they're working on a more impressive update. Here's a preview http://photosynth.net/preview/view/df869f96-2765-4939-8eb3-2... You can zoom in an out, pan around, and hit 'c' to see a wireframe.
I have no doubt they're overall a very small research producer but Facebook's stuff[0] seems to be really heavily based on stuff they've actually done. I won't make a judgement on the kind of stuff MS produce but there's definitely something to be said for building something awesome and then sharing the technical information.
I have no doubt they're overall a very small research producer but Facebook's stuff[0] seems to be really heavily based on stuff they've actually done. I won't make a judgement on the kind of stuff MS produce but there's definitely something to be said for building something awesome and then sharing the technical information.
Kinect v1.0 was not an MSR product, although they did assist with the software. Kinect v2.0 was wholly developed at Microsoft, however. Again, with v2.0, MSR assisted with significant portions of the development.
The pose detection was from MSR and was technically very impressive at the time. Jamie Shotton and colleagues did the work. Primesense provided the RGBD camera: Shotton et al did the skeleton extraction.
My impression of Microsoft Research is that they are like PARC: doing a lot of impressive research that rarely gets turned into compelling products.
The Kinect was a big payoff from MSR. What are some others?