While other companies may be under pressure to cut back on basic research, Microsoft is going in the other direction, embarking on an aggressive effort to expand its research lab. The company has attracted 300 scientists to its Redmond, Wash., campus since it created a research lab in 1991, and plans to add 300 more over the next few years.
Microsoft Research is a separate organization charged with looking into four strategic areas: advanced interactivity and intelligence; programming tools and methodologies; systems; and architecture and theory.
James Kajiya, assistant director of Microsoft Research, says 200 scientists are working on what could be termed "pure research,'' while 100 are doing applied research on specific projects.
Microsoft Research operates in a semiacademic tradition that gives researchers great latitude. For example, Microsoft is starting a new group to look at the convergence of computing and communications. Kajiya says the plan is to hire a senior researcher who will be given "the freedom to define that program.''
"The marching orders are pretty general,'' he says. And similar to the Sun model, there is no formal mechanism for how a project gets started or how the technology becomes a product. "It's almost all based on personal contact," he says.
Kajiya says company Chairman Bill Gates takes a keen interest in Microsoft Research, suggesting areas to investigate and reading papers that come out of the lab. "Senior management understands the value of long-term research," he says. "It takes time to create fundamental breakthroughs, and they're willing to invest for the long-term.''
Some of Microsoft Research's most intriguing projects are in the areas of speech recognition, text-to-speech systems, natural language analysis, intelligent tools, 3-D graphics and decision theory.
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