most of MS "research" is spent on lawyers
to rationalize intellectual property theft.

~D

for the week with your control-freak venom. You're only 1st level, though, no style at all.

All of you MS haters are asswipes. Nothing MS will ever do will satisfy you because your angry with your own pathetic lives. Ranting about MS wont change the fact that your still going to have to clean that toilet or stock those shelves so shut it and get back to work douchbags.

Are they spending more because they need to in order to keep ahead? Or, are they just 33% less efficient at it?

My money's on the latter...

Yes, M$ invented games consoles out of the void. Wasn't Atari, Coleco, Nintendo, or the dozens of others, all of that is just fable. The vision of M$ "seers" puts the Oracle at Delphi into shadow, and the Book of Revelations is but a wild guess.

By the way, last I've been able to find, best guess is that XBox is STILL losing money, especially after the far-seeing engineers didn't predict heat problems.

People think Microsoft is all about Windows and Office, but their R&D is far more reaching than that covering all kinds of markets and research that will allow the company to compete outside the territories it already dominates.

Microsoft doesn't want to stagnate, and their seers see far beyond the shortsighted views of the average populace, especially most INQ readers. It's why they start projects like the XBox at a short-term loss, despite the naysaying of every armchair analyst. Microsoft is in it for the long haul, and do not want to go the way of lesser companies that have squandered their long term investments with short-term gains. Just look at how many great companies of old have become mere shells of their former glory when they allowed their R&D to lax in the name of short-term profit.

Kudos to Microsoft for not initiating its own decline.

Is this for real? There are sole proprietorships pumping out more ideas with no R&D budget!

If this is true they need to divert the funds into what they are best at - buying out competitors with ideas and spreading FUD against competitors. Imagine how much lawsuits could be had for half that amount! Or a Linux causes cancer campaign!

If it's going into interface design they've overlooked their own current stupidites. Example: select several icons with ctrl-click. Now double-click one of those (easy to do by accident); Windows begins copying files into same directory with new name "Copy of..." -- I don't believe that ANYONE has ever wished to do that, but there it is, a first level function that's cost me a great deal of time to clean up after.

Even worse is the way that after looking into a sub-dir the GUI resets to display from first file, rather than located at the directory you just went into, so if there are more a few, you must use the scroll bar just to get back to where you were.

Yet more fundamental is fixing the menus at left, nearly ensuring worst-case mouse travel all the time, particularly since the windowing buttons are at right. Centered menus would be better, but that's absolutely hard-coded, and absolutely sacrosanct merely because it's the M$ way.

Mindless and needless repetition of common mechanical motions seems to escape their notice. Just think of all the millions of man-hours wasted due to their lousy interface design that's never been improved since version 1.

So I wonder what "R&D" does at M$. All their billions haven't made my daily use a bit better.

I do not think it is fair to say that all of Microsoft's R and D went to interfaces and reporting. I also do not think it is fair to say that all of Microsoft's R and D goes into playing catch-up in their markets.

If you look and Microsoft's R and D website you will see they have a number of facilities and a number of interests for research. Many of which have no direct economic benefit at the present. Things like bioinformatics and biomedical computing. Some of which many not have direct economic benefit for many years. Things like quantum computing and nanotechnology.

My point is simply that Microsoft has a wide array of R and D projects and Microsoft is not taking simply using its R and D to play catch-up.

I think we do not give Microsoft enough credit for the discoveries they make in this industry.

thats why your ms operating system costs so much
they need that much dough to throw at r&d because their products are so buggy and vulnerable!
i use a free one but i'm not saying which!....

Microsoft is not a leader. It is a follower. It is always late to market with new product categories (eg search and touchscreen mobile), so playing catch-up is always more expensive.

It must acquire companies to catch up to competitors. It must spend more just to get to the same level as competitors who were in the game earlier. Even after such massive spends, Microsoft is still playing second fiddle in new markets, behind those more nimble competitors.

This is money down the drain that would not have been necessary had Microsoft a visionary leader in the first place.