Microsoft: from research to reality
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
Rick Rashid senior vice president at Microsoft, heads up Microsoft's research group, which is charged with researching many of the innovative technologies transferred to key Microsoft products. Rashid met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Lead Analyst Jon Udell, and Test Center Technical Director Tom Yager to discuss his group's projects, particularly in the areas of wireless, natural language, and search technologies.
InfoWorld: Would you agree that there is more of a connection now between Microsoft Research technologies and the architecture and products coming from Microsoft?
Rashid: I think that's accurate. We started Microsoft Research back in September of 1991 and didn't even have 100 researchers until 1996. We're about 700 now, in five different research labs, and so we're capable of doing a lot more in terms of working with more product teams, generating more technologies, and covering more areas. The deployable technologies are reaching a stage where they're catching up with the things that we've been doing in research over the last [few] years. For example, a lot of the technologies that we're doing for the next versions of Office, next versions of Windows are things that we've been building within the research group for some time: building expertise, building the teams, and building the relations to the product.