MS's approach to research is fundamentally different than Google's. Google's approach is about creating better Google products. Microsoft's approach (which is really Bill Gates's dream) is to advance science.

Both are good goals. But if you ask a researcher from MS how important it is to get in a future version of Windows, they may well shrug their shoulders. Their feeling is if they can advance technology then all boats rise, which is good for Microsoft.

I must say when I'm actually doing research, and not just dev work for product Version Next, I don't want to do unit tests and a whole bunch of other cruft. My code isn't meant to be shipped to customers. Its meant to test a hypothesis.

MSFT research is much more like research of great American companies of the past, Bell, AT+T etc - I'm sure this is what they were aiming for.

I agree. For example, Leslie Lamport, who invented many distributed algorithms that are used at Google (eg. Paxos is used in Chubby and in Megastore) works at Microsoft Research. Watching or reading interviews with him, I get the feeling that he is a "pure [computer] scientist", probably not that interested in getting his stuff into the next product.

This is what scares me about Microsoft Research. Since Google's research adds direct value to what it's doing, it is quite unlikely to disintegrate.

I suspct if left completely up to Sinofsky or Ballmer MSR would shut down (or be substantially smaller). I think as long as Gates is alive and/or has large influence, it will be a relatively big part of MS.

The appeal of Google for many researchers is that you can test your hypothesis much more broadly when actual people use it than when it's confined to a research lab. Having a billion+ actual users generates tons of data which can itself spawn new research directions and inform new hypotheses.

I read repeatedly that much of Kinect's software was derived from their in-house R&D. Is that not true?

The computer vision aspects to the Kinect (and there are a lot, and very well done), were headed up by Andrew Blake at MS Research Cambridge, who's one of the foremost vision scientists in the world.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ablake/

Most recently they have built the machine learning technology inside the Xbox Kinect human motion tracking system.

It is true. Microsoft bought from PrimeSense the IR depth sensor technology, but all the body recognition/tracking software was developed by Microsoft Research.

I don't know specifics about Kinect, but I do know that MSR has done a ton of work on computer vision and its applications over the last ten or fifteen years, and I would be extremely surprised if that work didn't inform the efforts of whoever did invent Kinect.

I agree mostly, though your assessment of Microsoft Research is not completely true. Don't forget they came up with the Songsmith :D

Isn't what Google practicing a kind of applied research? Where MS Research is doing basic research which advances the science.

As were Google earth, gmail, google docs, wave etc

GMail was definitely internally done (by Paul Buchheit). I'm pretty sure Wave as too.

But yes, maps/earth, docs, voice, etc. were acquisitions.