Microsoft needs to invest in R&D

Maybe they could deliver products that customers want, and use a continuous improvement plan too.

When a board member of a software company starts waffling and drifting into "helping survivors of bombings" you know you have a board member with a problem. And a company with a problem board member.

It's not hard, focus on the customer, focus on the products. Stop drifting off into day dreams of nonsense. ;-)

Of course if he is saying that there is a ridiculously huge government budget for "war", and that software makers can tap into this budget, then he's doing his job of raking it in.

I am sure the comments and our viewpoints would be different if this guy was at google. But yes we all want to see MS get better at their core products, maybe venturing off on R&D things would help their core products...in the long run.

Yesterday Mike Magee Laid Out RANT on MadMike (Now Retracted) about Whole Crew Being turned Over & That israel Mossard, Thianks to Slyvia Barak, Is At heart of Wvil. WELL, I Never. ITS ALL DRASHEK, mikie. MepLaw & LawMep, Mep His Mind, its for today Only. Well Guess Mike Got Some. It'd Be Better If Microsoft & Intel Put O/S in Television, Where Its Safe & ReLoadable thru Dedicated Parts. Don't Even Ask Flvour, Its Mep. TS Drashek

Being an expat Englishman, now having lived in Greece for 5 years, I can fully understand the frustrations of not being able to communicate in the Greek language. However, I cannot understand what possesses someone who has very little ability to make themselves understood in a particular language to post comments. I am of course referring to the post made by uLTEE_tOM. The phrase that springs to mind is "Its all Greek to me". I am not just singling out this particular post for criticism as I am constantly encountering baffling posts from people where I have not got any clue what they are trying to say. To get back to the topic, of course all development companies need to invest in R&D, but we all know that the seed of an R&D project is a great idea, and while money can easily help develop an idea, it is not capable of creating the idea in the first place. This is why so many small companies germinate an idea and are then acquired by bigger companies with the financial muscle necessary to develop the product further. For this reason Microsoft can only be as good as the level of talented people it employees or acquires, no matter how much money it throws at the problem.

Seasonal readers of INQ, read this ...
Microsoft spends too much on R&D
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/942/1050942/microsoft-spends-r-d

SHAREHOLDERS CLAIM THAT MICROSOFT is underperforming because it spends too much on Research and Development.

Craig Montgomery, who is leading a shareholder revolt, said that Vole needs to trim the $8 billion boffin budget and buy a mobile phone outfit.

He contrasts Vole's $8 billion with Apple's $782 million and Oracle's $85 million. And while Apple and Oracle make a killing, Microsoft shares have been underperforming for years.

Even Google has only spent a billion on new projects.

You will soon learn to simply skip any replies containing "Drashek" in it, as they seem to be generated by a program. I do notice that some of the Drashek replies seem to have some relevance beyond just what a machine would produce, so I think someone is feeding it specific terms based on the topic.

for example the poor state of readiness of Vista and especially Vista 64 going to market is one place R&D should have been used to enhance the beta process and should now be used to get Win7 more than ready.

MS is slow to adapt to game changing innovation like multicore and 64 bit with its 4Gb RAM utilisation.

Apps to assist emergency communication systems would be a laudable and worthy project I am sure and would work better if Windows itself was a worthy foundation built for the people who use it rather than the people who build it.

MS is like some pre-cambrian multicell monster composed entirely of tentacles each pulling in a different direction with no coordinating nerve net.

MS employees like to project the company as a brain but in fact it is more like a jellyfish adrift.

MS needs an organ to allow it to understand how the product is perceived and received and what expectations are, so it can react to them. Its primary R&D needs to be user & market oriented. It also needs internal flexibility and discipline so that it is not torn apart by departmental conflicts of interests.

Once Windows is meeting the fundamental requirements of a good OS then MS can mess with the future. It has yet to catch up with the present IMHO.

Any time they want to 'innovate' they just steal something from some other product and incorporate it into their own.

In other words, Microsoft is going to spend a billion dollars to give us an animated dog with a fireman's hat that requires (2) 1GB video cards in an SLI setup, 8GB of RAM and a quad core CPU to run.
Brilliant!

How will R&D fix a design that faulty from square one? They need to fix their design from the ground up.Either that or go the way of the dino.
Its their choice, I could careless if microsoft lives or dies.