
Microsoft to Close Microsoft Research Lab in Silicon Valley - davmre
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-close-microsoft-research-lab-in-silicon-valley-7000033838/
======
Someone1234
I thought Microsoft's stated goal for these layoffs was to reduce the amount
of managerial indirection, remember this catchy quote from the layoff
announcement:

> fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the
> flow of information and decision making.

But yet the vast majority of people who have been laid off have been engineers
or other "boots on the ground" types. It doesn't really sound like Microsoft
is doing anything about their huge internal political debt (that makes them so
inflexible and slow moving).

Plus, to me, sacking your research people is never a "good" indicator for a
company. That either means that your research was entirely misguided OR that
you've just given up on new innovation/first to market.

If I was a long term Microsoft shareholder I'd definitely have mixed feelings
right now. On one hand Microsoft has made cost savings, but on the other hand
it might be at the cost of their long term growth.

... We'll just have to wait and see how this all turns out...

~~~
tdicola
The extra irony is cutting jobs and research while spending billions to buy a
game franchise.

~~~
teej
I don't see any irony. This tiny layoff (~2% of the workforce) is completely
unrelated to a franchise purchase to drive growth in the entertainment
division. Microsoft isn't hurting, it's reorganizing.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
It makes MSFT look some combination of bad/inept/stupid in Silicon Valley. Its
obviously not quantifiable in the MBA fashion, but especially in Silicon
Valley MSFT needs as much of a good presence as it can get, I think.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Microsoft is already
considered bad/inept/stupid pretty universally in Silicon Valley, and that
this doesn't change anything.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
However, there were a few Turing award winners in that lab.

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arjunnarayan
I see that this is being spun as part of the larger layoffs at Microsoft in
general, but make no mistake, this is _highly_ unusual for an institution as
distinguished and well respected as Microsoft Research (both internally at
Microsoft, and externally amongst academia in general)

I think there is much more under the surface than is visible here. We'll have
to wait for the official PR story from Microsoft (which I'm sure will clarify
nothing at all). But for now I remain puzzled at this move.

~~~
rtkwe
This isn't their only lab location though. Microsoft Research isn't going
away, just what's probably one of their more expensive locations.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
I think there's something intangible though, about having _some_ research
presence in the middle of Silicon Valley.

~~~
nobodysfool
The 'intangibles' you speak of are housing and money.

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davmre
MSR Silicon Valley is a satellite office, smaller than Redmond, Cambridge,
Beijing, and probably several others. Still, it employs (employed?) some heavy
hitters, including Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport. Many of these people
will probably receive offers to relocate, per the article, but presumably not
everyone wants to move to Redmond, hence the existence of the SV lab in the
first place. So some will leave Microsoft and seek jobs elsewhere, as will all
the researchers that don't receive relocation offers.

As some of my grad student friends have observed, this may be a tough year to
be on the academic/research job market...

~~~
AceJohnny2
> including Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport

I can think of one or two companies in the Silicon Valley who are salivating
at the idea of hiring the pioneer of distributed systems.

~~~
JetSpiegel
You mean the inventor of LaTeX. And by "mean", I mean "also".

~~~
it_learnses
You also the inventor of LaTex?

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santaclaus
Word on the street is that only six members of the research lab were offered
jobs at other Microsoft Research locations...

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dude_abides
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time ever a Microsoft
Research lab is being closed? It reflects a lot on how the new CEO Nadella
views fundamental (academic) research in his priority list.

Though this may be the right move for MSFT shareholders, this is certainly a
backward step for computer science research as a whole. MSR is the last
remaining industry lab which focuses on pure academic research, and I hope MSR
remains.

~~~
brwnll
I disagree with this statement. Contrarily, closing the Valley location could
be an indicator Nadella holds a high value on the other world wide locations.

If your hope is to attract top global talent to work on global issues, having
two labs nearly on top of each other in Santa Barbara and the Valley doesn't
make much since.

Current lab locations: Redmond, WA; Cambridge, UK; Beijing, China; Munich,
Germany; Bangalore, India; Santa Barbara, CA; Cairo, Egypt; Herzelia, Isreal.

~~~
AceJohnny2
> having two labs nearly on top of each other in Santa Barbara and the Valley
> doesn't make much sense.

I think you may be confusing Santa Barbara, which is close to Los Angeles and
approximately 5 hours drive from the Valley, with the closer Santa Clara,
which is _in_ the Valley, or Santa Cruz, which is about an hour south of the
Valley.

~~~
thetrb
If you look at labs distributed world-wide then a 5 hour drive is really not
that much.

~~~
AceJohnny2
Yeah, I was wondering if the parent meant this. However, the Silicon Valley is
arguably the highest concentration of CS talent in the world, and the
researchers from the closed office may not want to move to Seattle when they
can easily get good offers from the likes of Google/FB/Dropbox!

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xnull2guest
Nah, this all has to do with ValueAct Capital, which is known for vulture
investment.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/11/microsoft-
new-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/11/microsoft-new-ceo-
valueact/5402897/)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/net-us-
microsoft-v...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/net-us-microsoft-
valueact-idUSBRE96I14920130719)

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/11/microsoft-appoints-
valueact...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/11/microsoft-appoints-valueact-
capitals-mason-morfit-to-its-board/)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/03/valueact-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/03/valueact-
hedge-funds-huge-microsoft-victory/)

ValueAct is known for coming in, increasing dividends, then dumping and
selling parts of the company and soaking in the profits - then leaving to work
on another firm.

The Ballmer 'retirement', after repeated announcements that he wouldn't
retire, have everything to do with the stake that VAC bought in Microsoft.

They are a patient bunch. If you look at what they want to do with Microsoft,
they want to make it an enterprise and cloud only business. They are forcing
Microsoft to move away from its OS, for example, and move its services and
offerings on other platforms. VAC has a history of waiting long periods of
time to gut and sell off the assets of companies.

Expect them to try to sell XBox, the recently acquired Nokia, the Surface and
its factories and any other such devices and the assets and infrastructure
associated with them.

~~~
WmiceJr
Sounds like a good business plan....divide & conquer!!

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Mandatum
RnD is expensive enough as it is, wouldn't it make sense to move out of
Startup Valley?

~~~
make3
While I agree that SV is expensive, I think most people agree that the talent
there is really not restricted to startups. Google, IBM Almaden Research
Center, to name a few, and then there's obviously Stanford and Berkeley very
close.

~~~
vonmoltke
Most people also agree that there is a severe lack of available talent in the
area and that it seems to be difficult to pull in people from out-of-area.
This creates a cycle where companies hire significant numbers of people from
competitors in the Valley. Perhaps MS decided that the cost of playing this
game was no longer worth the benefits.

~~~
thetrb
I definitely would not say that most people agree to this. Otherwise it would
be very surprising to see Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung and many others
growing their presence in Silicon Valley.

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scythe
My immediate assumption is that they're just moving it to Santa Barbara, where
they established a facility in 2005:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/labs/stationq/default.as...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/labs/stationq/default.aspx)

That's not so far away; it's easy for an organization like Microsoft, with no
ties to SV or need for them, to relocate when real estate becomes a problem.

~~~
arjunnarayan
MSR Station Q (at Santa Barbara) is 12 researchers. MSR SVC was about 75.

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bhouston
I understood most of Microsoft Research is based in Seattle.

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keithpeter
Does this include Jaron Lanier and his team?

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peterkelly
MS Research is the only part of the company that actually does anything truly
innovative.

Oh well...

~~~
peterkelly
I understand the downvotes as a knee-jerk reaction, but the thing to
understand here is that MS research is largely separate from the product
development side.

Spend some time having a look at some of their publications and you'll see
what i mean.

Examples

\- [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/barrelfish/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/barrelfish/)

\- [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/fsharp/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fsharp/)

~~~
Someone1234
Special mention for this one also:

[https://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/singularity/](https://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/singularity/)

Unfortunately it never went anywhere (VERY unfortunately). Also this one more
recently:

[https://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/drawbridge/](https://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/drawbridge/)

Which might wind up being Microsoft's answer to Docker-like containers.

~~~
amaks
Singularity has evolved into Midori project but to the latest rumor it was
cancelled and the team disbanded.

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discardorama
People are confusing MSR with MSR-SV. MSR-SV is a small(er) outpost; located
in SV so they can mop up some talent down here. Their biggest labs are still
in Redmond, Cambridge (UK) and Beijing, I think.

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muneeb
That lab had three turing award winners (Leslie Lamport, Chuck Thacker, and
Bob Tarjan as visiting researcher). This is how MSFT treats turing award
winners now?

------
martincmartin
I wonder about the fate of the Microsoft New England R&D Center in Cambridge,
MA.

~~~
rchowe
It's probably still valuable for Microsoft to have an east coast presence,
especially if it allows them to recruit from Boston-area tech schools, MIT
especially.

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philwelch
Probably a smart move, if only because Microsoft was always going to have
retention problems in Silicon Valley anyway.

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redwood
I can only imagine who will move into the office space

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loldude
hahahahahahaha

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loldude
hahahahaahahahaha

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dicroce
I guess they already figured out all the things?

------
ranran876
I can't think of anything from Microsoft Research that has translated into an
actual product (other than maybe the Kinect.. though I think a lot of that IP
was bought). They do some neat stuff I guess, but it seems like a giant money
sink. Can anyone prove my wrong?

As an aside, I had a professor from the MS Research lab in Santa Barbara who
was a complete moron. Seemed like he was some kind of middle manager at MS and
then went to Research for an early semi-retirement

~~~
kvb
Tons of stuff has been productized in various forms. .NET generics, for
instance, were initially developed in MSR Cambridge. MSR research has
contributed to speech recognition, search technologies in Bing, Excel's Flash
Fill, SQL Server's Hekaton in-memory architecture, and many other products.

~~~
Someone1234
Those and thousands more listed here:

[https://research.microsoft.com/en-
US/about/techtransfer/defa...](https://research.microsoft.com/en-
US/about/techtransfer/default.aspx)

Just click the years on the sidebar.

