Office 2007 Microsoft hones its research-to-commer

In any Microsoft Investigation (MSR) discussion, Microsoft officials emphasize that MSR does both fundamental and applied study with no strain applied to researchers to productize the outcomes. Accordingly, there is no assure that any offered MSR technologies is going to be commercialized at some certain date,Office Professional 2007, in some particular way. That caveat may quickly develop into unneeded, given that so a number of MSR jobs have morphed — and are continuing to morph — into key components of established Microsoft products, and/or standalone products in their own right. As Microsoft officials are touting on September 26 – which is the 15th anniversary of the founding of MSR – MSR has grow to be a well-established pipeline for getting new technologies into the market. At the two-day MSR celebration in Redmond for press and analysts (which, alas, I’m covering from afar),Windows 7 Professional, Microsoft officials are planning to highlight some of the most successful technologies transfers that have occurred between the 700 MSR researchers worldwide and the a number of Microsoft product groups. To demonstrate this trend, the MSR team is planning to emphasize heavily researchers’ contributions to Windows Vista and Office 2007. When asked to list the most important MSR contributions to Vista, Senior Vice President of Research Rick Rashid offered this laundry list (in no specific order): • Static driver verifier, which automates device-driver analysis to check for potential code problems; • Optimization technologies for speeding up processes in Vista systems; • Search technique/algorithm elements that is going to be embedded in Vista’s embedded desktop search engine; • Photo-handling improvements that are part of the new Windows Media Photo digital-photo format; • New user experience elements that will turn into part of the final Vista user interface (thanks to the work of researcher Lili Cheng and her team, who are in the midst of filtering back from the Windows team to study, Rashid said); • DirectX graphics; • And last (but definitely not least),Office Professional 2010, security functionality, such as cryptographic enhancements “I think we do a better job than other companies, in terms of moving our investigation into products,” Rashid said. However, “we don’t bias the front end. When good results come out,Windows 7 Pro, we take advantage of them,” he added. Microsoft is planning to show off at its research-fest quite a lot of assignments,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, including Windows Live Local mapping, surface computing advances and “virtual worlds” developments. But it also is planning to show off some less-######y but potentially more far-reaching distributed computing technologies. I’ll have more on that in my next post.