Microsoft Research does some really exciting stuff. Most of what they do is real hackers' material, the sort of stuff you'd expect from a guy in his mom's basement or Ph.D's theses.
It's a shame that most of their research (stuff like Singularity and this IE-OS project) never see the light of day, but some of the stuff you can DL is really nifty... and rather unheard of.
They have some really interesting prototypes and proof-of-concept software out that can be downloaded from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
It's a shame that most of their research (stuff like Singularity and this IE-OS project) never see the light of day, but some of the stuff you can DL is really nifty... and rather unheard of.