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Researching the Future of Tech

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Five years from today, one of the things that is absolutely changing is display technology. Every output device will be an input device. Displays will be able to respond to the world before them. Large flat panel display screens would be as cheap to produce white boards are today. Large-scale storage is going to have a huge impact.The combination of large amounts storage and networking will completely change science. 

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My primary role is to move the state of the art in research forward. Before joining Microsoft, I was professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. One of the things I brought with me to Microsoft was the university research model from Carnegie Mellon. It is an open environment where researchers publish their papers. Nobody reads the papers before they are published. We do not have lawyers' research peeping over people's shoulders. We do not have a lot of bureaucracy. We do not have budgets.

I don't have budgets for each of the projects, because I don't want to create barriers between the researchers. I do not want to have people to feel that if they work with a person and make him successful, they will have more money the next year. I want to create an atmosphere that is cooperative, and do not want people to be thinking about the financials of what they are doing. If some body needs something for their work, they will get it. They are not supposed to ask for things they do not need. If they ask for too many things that they do not need, they will be fired. I am making it their personal responsibility to use their funds wisely and be successful. So, they can't hide behind a budget. So, it actually works out to be more cost effective than having budgets. And they act more responsibly. If you treat people like adults, they behave like adults and if you treat them like children, they behave like children. That is my way of handling it. By eliminating the bureaucracy, I give people an environment where they can freely do their research.

Rick Rashid, Senior Vice-President, 



Microsoft Research 

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When there is an idea that is proved, one of the first things that I did when I came to Microsoft is to create a team of mostly PhDs, but with product experience, and their job is to do technology transfer. They work with the product teams and the researchers and they help smoothen the transition of research ideas into products. 

We are very aggressive about publishing our works and that is in fact one of the ways in which we measure ourselves.

If you go to the top conferences, you will see a fairly significant, if not dominating presence from Microsoft Research. We are a significant force in moving the state of the art forward in many research areas.

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What percentage of the research reaches products?



I don't know. The way I look at it is, what percentage of our products does not take advantage of our research, and the answer is zero. 

Our products are either built using technologies that came from our research, or they just came from Research to begin with. The Tablet PC came out of our lab in Cambridge, England. All the natural language and speech technologies came out of our labs in Redmond and Beijing. The photo technologies in our photoproducts came from our labs in Cambridge, Beijing and the US. All the data mining in SQL Server came from the research group. 

A lot of research projects have been spun off as product teams. I started the first e-commerce group in the company. The last time I counted, there were ten corporate VPs who have worked for me in

the past.

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Back in 1992, I worked on a project that reduced the working size of 32 bit code by a factor of 2. We thought that we are great people and we were very excited about it. We talked to our product teams, and they too agreed that we were very smart people. But we do not have any 32 bit code, they said!, So we don't care what you are doing. You may have a great solution, but we do not have that problem! Three years later, when we were bringing out Win 95, DRAM prices were pretty high, and so we were trying to fit out 32 bit product into the same sized machine that ran 16 bit code. We used the technology we had developed earlier to make Windows and Office run in small amounts of memory and allowed us to simultaneously ship Windows and Office. That was hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues. Lotus and WordPerfect did not have that technology and they did not get their 32 bit products out in the same time frame, and even when they did, it took up more memory. That gave us a huge strategic advantage.

Five years from today, one of the things that is absolutely changing is display technology. I do not know if it's exactly five years, you are moving to a world, where large displays are going to be very important. Large flat panel display screens would be as cheap to produce white boards are today. So you would not need white boards. You would use

LCDs. And they will not just be output devices; they will also be the input devices. 

Every output device will be an input device. Displays, large and small, will be sensitive to touch. Screens will be able to effectively see what is in front of them. 



Displays will be able to respond to the world before them. We are investigating how this (including large displays) will affect how
we do things, including have meetings.

Large-scale storage is going to have a huge impact. We can store literally every conversation you have during your life. Applications that can leverage such storage will happen. One of the applications we are experimenting with is in medicine for people with memory loss.

The combination of large amounts storage and networking will completely change science. The raw material of science

and not just the distilled version can be put online and made available to all.

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