1. MGB 2003 © 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

2. Managing Innovation: How Microsoft Research Works
MGB 2003
Managing Innovation: How Microsoft Research Works
Jim Gray
Distinguished Engineer
Microsoft Corporation
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

3. Actionable Ideas Co-lo if possible Adopt a “university model”
Recruit from the top
Recruit for passion and a desire to have impact
Install a Research Program Management organization to orchestrate tech-transfer
Institute an annual TechFest

4. Innovation Build versus Buy versus Invest
Build: Have in-house research
Bell Labs, IBM, GM, Pfizer, Merc, Microsoft…
Buy: Acquire startups or whole companies
IBM, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Pfizer, Merc…
Invest: All boats rise
Government research funding
All 3 approaches valid
Complement one another

5. Companies Are Different
IBM
S G&A
23%
Product
31%
Gross
38%
other 2%
R&D 6%
Intel
R&D
15%
S G&A
16%
Product
19%
Gross
50%
Microsoft
Gross
40%
Product
18%
S G&A
27%
R&D
15%
Oracle
R&D
12%
Gross
36%
Product
26%
S G&A
Accenture
Gross
32%
Product
47%
S G&A
21%
R&D 0% HP
S G&A
16%
Product
44%
Gross
27%
other 7%
R&D 6%
Cisco
S G&A
25%
Product
33%
Gross
26%
R&D
16%
DELL
R&D 1%
Gross
18%
Product
73%
S G&A 8%
EDS
S G&A 9%
Product
69%
Gross 8%
other
14%
R&D 0%
Selected IT company FY02 R&D budgets:
Notice that R&D is correlated with margin
IBM and HP have large service revenues So, their “real” R&D investment rate is higher
Dell, Accenture, EDS have modest R&D – innovate in other ways

6. Microsoft Is Different
It is a software company:
Almost entirely an IP company
Margins on successful products are enormous
The cost of failure is enormous – missed market
It is BIG and so must look for BIG bets
High-velocity business: Product mix shifts every decade. If you miss a shift, you are dead.

7. Most R&D Is D How to Do Basic Research in Industry
Most R&D Is D How to Do Basic Research in Industry? Critical questions (from Rick Rashid)
How can I create and maintain a world class research organization in an industrial setting?
How do I keep the lines of communication open between product teams and researchers?
How do I get new technology into products quickly?

8. Approach Adapt the Academic Model
Organizational goal: Advance state of the art
University organizational model
Flat structure, critical mass groups
Open research environment
Aggressive publication in peer-reviewed literature
Frequent visitors, daily seminars
Strong ties to University Research
Nearly 15% of basic research budget directly invested in Universities
Lab grants, research grants, fellowships, etc.
Hundreds of interns and visitors

9. Microsoft Research Today
MGB 2003
Microsoft Research Today
Founded in 1991
Staff of over 700 in over 55 areas
Internationally recognized research teams
Research lab locations :
Redmond, Washington, %
San Francisco, California %
Cambridge, United Kingdom 10%
Beijing, People’s Republic of China 10%
Mountain View, California %
Founded in 1991 to pursue technologies that are of strategic importance to MS’s future.
We hire the best and the brightest and we’re all deeply dedicated to working closely with MS product groups
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

10. Microsoft Research Expanding the State of the Art
Thousands of peer-reviewed publications
10%…30% of papers at our focus conferences graphics, programming, systems, data management…
Community leadership
Professional societies
Journals
Conferences
Mentoring Interns
Hosting academic summers and sabbaticals
Special workshops

11. How To Build A Group Identify a promising area
Hire the leader (internal or external)
Support her/him
Build team around senior researcher
Look for people who
Want to have impact
Have passion for their ideas
Same template works for whole labs
Cambridge, Beijing, Silicon Valley

12. Keeping Open The Lines Of Communication To Product Teams
Co-location helps: 75% “on campus”
“How can I help?” attitude demonstrates willingness to “get dirty” to help product succeed
Product group spin-offs build strong ties Over time a number of product groups evolved from research (e.g., Windows Media)
Researchers involved in all corporate product reviews

13. MSR Relationship To MS Products
Virtually every research group actively engaged with product groups
E.G., Windows, Office, streaming media, SQL, Exchange, IIS, commerce server, visual studio, office, consumer products, MSN, etc.
Tech transfer:
Ideas
Code
People
Contacts
Recruiting

14. Focused Technology Transfer Quickly getting technology into products
Program management team with sole focus on tech transfer
Researchers on product “advisory” boards
“Mind-swaps” – joint product/research off-sites
Joint product/research teams, e.g.,
ClearType (Windows XP)
Datamining (SQL 2000)
Natural Language & Speech (Office)
TabletPC
Smart Personal Objects (SPOT)
Encourage and recognize contributions

15. MSR Techfest Internal open house for Microsoft Research
Annual event since 2001
~ 7000 attendees
170 demos, 26 lectures
“Research in progress”
Breadboard demos
This is research idea/prototype
Great networking event:
Breaks down barriers
Serendipitous connections.

16. Examples Of Technology Transfer
Critical support technologies
Memory Optimization Technology enabled sim-ship of Win95/Office95
Automated bug detection in Windows 2000
Key technologies that drive products
E.G., MS audio 4.0, ClearType, intelligent search, collaborative filtering, Intellimirror, etc.
Incubated major products
Windows streaming media
Windows CE, TabletPC, eBook
Ecommerce, Datamining
Natural language and speech technologies, etc.

17. MSR Mission Statement
Expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which we do research
Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
Ensure that Microsoft products have a future

18. Personal Examples of R&D
Scaleable Servers
TerraServer
SkyServer
Databases
Data Cube, Snapshot Isolation
SQL Stress testing
Reliable Multicast
Personal Media Management

19. TerraServer & TerraService
MGB 2003
TerraServer & TerraService
TerraServer
TerraService
USGS Photo and Topo maps
16TB of data
Online since 1997
7 billon pages served 120 TB served
Shows
Scalability
Availability
Manageability
SQL + Windows
A .NET web service
OpenGIS
Place Search
TerraServer Map Server
Landmarks & annotations layered on imagery
Used by thousands of real apps today
Shows
Web Services
Performance
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

20. TerraServer Today

21. TerraServer Tomorrow Mirrored System versus SAN
3 mirrored DB servers + spare versus 4 DB servers
Commodity versus Enterprise
White box Dual Xeon versus 8-way branded
DAS 250GB SATA versus FC-SAN 73GB SCSI
No Tape versus LTO Tape Robot
$0.1M versus $1.8M
Geoplex: 2 sites
You can afford 2!
KVM / IP

22. World Wide Telescope http://www.voforum.org/
Premise: Most Astro data is online
So, the Internet is the world’s best telescope:
Has data on every part of the sky
In every measured spectral band
As deep as the best instruments
It is up when you are up; the “seeing” is always great (no working at night, no clouds no moons no…)
It’s a smart telescope:
links objects and data to literature on them

23. Next-Generation Data Analysis
Looking for
Needles in haystacks – the Higgs particle
Haystacks: Dark matter, Dark energy
Needles are easier than haystacks
Global statistics have poor scaling
Correlation functions are N2, likelihood techniques N3
As data and computers grow at same rate, we can only keep up with N logN
A way out?
data is fuzzy, answers are approximate
Requires combination of statistics and computer science

24. Data Federations Of Web Services
Massive datasets live near their owners:
Near the instrument’s software pipeline
Near the applications
Near data knowledge and curation
Super Computer centers become Super Data Centers
Each Archive publishes a web service
Schema: documents the data
Methods on objects (queries)
Scientists get “personalized” extracts
Uniform access to multiple Archives
A common global schema
Challenge:
What is the object model for your science?
Federation

25. Web Services – The Key? Web SERVER: Web SERVICE:
Your
program
Web
Service
http
Web SERVER:
Given a url + parameters
Returns a web page (often dynamic)
Web SERVICE:
Given a XML document (soap msg)
Returns an XML document
Tools make this look like an RPC.
F(x,y,z) returns (u, v, w)
Distributed objects for the web.
+ naming, discovery, security,..
Internet-scale distributed computing
Web page
Your
program
Web
Service
soap
Data
In your address space
object in xml

26. Federating Astronomy Archives
IRAS 25m
Great Test for data mining algorithms
It is real and well documented data
High-dimensional data (with confidence intervals)
Spatial data
Temporal data
Many different instruments from many different places and many different times
Federation is a goal
There is a lot of it (petabytes)
Can share cross company
University researchers
2MASS 2m
DSS Optical
IRAS 100m
WENSS 92cm
NVSS 20cm
ROSAT ~keV
GB 6cm

27. SkyServer – One such archive SkyServer.SDSS.org
Sloan Digital Sky Survey Pixels + Data Mining
400 attributes per “object”
Spectrograms for 1%
Demo: pixel space record space set space teaching

28. SkyQuery: Federating Archives http://skyquery.net/
Distributed Query tool using a set of web services
Federates ten astronomy archives from Pasadena, Chicago, Baltimore, Cambridge (England)
Implemented in C# and .NET
Allows queries like:
SELECT o.objId, o.r, o.type, t.objId
FROM SDSS:PhotoPrimary o,
TWOMASS:PhotoPrimary t
WHERE XMATCH(o,t)<3.5
AND AREA(181.3,-0.76,6.5)
AND o.type=3 and (o.I - t.m_j)>2

29. SkyQuery Structure Portal Each SkyNode publishes Plans Query (2 phase)
Integrates answers
Is itself a web service
Each SkyNode publishes
Schema Web Service
Database Web Service
Image Cutout
INT
SDSS
SkyQuery
Portal
FIRST
2MASS

30. Databases Theory to practice
Data Cube
Wrote paper
SQL Server product and ISO Standard adopted idea
Snapshot Isolation
Paper in 1996
Product in 2004
old
Reader
version
new

31. Databases Stress Test Generate millions of random SQL queries
SqlServer
Generate millions of random SQL queries
Send them to 4 different products
Compare the answers:
If all agree, good!
If not, a bug somewhere
Found many bugs in DB products
Much appreciated by MS DB group
Tool cloned by other DB vendors
DB2 =
Oracle
Informix

32. SQL Automated Test Example
Four SQL systems on 2,000 statements
Case
W X Y Z
All four agree 84%
W,X, and Y agree 95%
Problem with intermediate table.
Error

33. PGM Pretty Good Multicast
Reliable multicast protocol
Scales using hierarchy, suppression, and FEC “on-demand” (FEC on-demand is our contribution)
Joint work with Cisco and others
IETF standard
Implemented prototype (Multicast PowerPoint)
Shipped in Windows XP

34. MyLifeBits “A lifetime store of everything” The experiment:
digitizing Gordon Bell’s life
The software:
Based on SQL server
Tools to capture web pages, IM chats, TV, radio & telephone
Reports, links, full text search, pivot by time or any other attribute

35. MyLifeBits Software Internet MyLifeBits store Radio capture tool
Telephone capture tool
PocketPC transfer tool
PocketRadio player
TV capture tool
MyLifeBits store
Internet
Radio EPG tool
TV EPG download tool
MAPI interface
Legacy client
Browser tool
database
files
Legacy applications
MyLifeBits Shell
Voice annotation tool
Text annotation tool

36. Research Failures Not everything is a success
We had technology transfer failures
We had projects with little impact
Success and Failure depend on environment
Even if you have a GREAT! idea
There are many exogenous factors in technology transfer
And, sometimes the idea or focus is wrong
Allow people to fail once or twice.

37. Summary Actionable Ideas
Co-lo if possible
Adopt a “university model”
Recruit from the top
Recruit for passion and a desire to have impact
Install a Research Program Management organization to orchestrate tech-transfer
Institute an annual TechFest

38. © 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
MGB 2003
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.