MSR gets wired, WIRED gets MSR

MSR natural-user-interaction immersive technologies

WIRED Magazine’s online site ran a great long profile of Microsoft Research late yesterday, with interviews and project features: “How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck.”

I have written about or mentioned all of the individual projects or technologies on my blog before, but the writing at WIRED is so much better than my own – and the photographs so cool – that I thought I should post a link to the story.

Gartner Says, Sometimes Hype is Necessary

Fact: Gartner is taking the same approach they often critique with their normally-solid “Hype Cycle” reports – arguing that “a little cloud hype” is beneficial if it “captures the imaginations of a broader audience of decision makers.”

Analysis: With their annual “Hype Cycle” reports, Gartner usually does a solid job of tracking over-optimistic assessments of the “latest and greatest” in technology and calling out overly hyped “hot new tech” and providing realistic assessments of the projected future of trends in software, hardware, and business processes.

Sometimes, Gartner slips up, and falls prey to the error they ascribe to others.  That’s the only interpretation I can make on a curious blog posting on an official Gartner blog designed to promote their new book “Mastering the Hype Cycle: Choosing the Right Innovation at the Right Time.”  Mark Raskino, the book’s co-author with longtime analyst Jackie Fenn, argues that “We have to simplify the business proposition behind this ‘big shift’,  explain it well and socialize it deeply to convince non-tech business leaders to buy-in.” 

Mr. Raskino makes clear that he wants to babytalk these business-side executives into believing “a little cloud hype” because, in his words, IT leaders and CIOs “need help explaining the fundamental change.”

Crisis? Pshaw. Be Bold with Research Investments

Bottom line: The smart companies will weather this fiscal crisis by “steering into the skid,” and actually increasing their investment in the future.

One of my last pieces of advice to DIA’s director before leaving last year was to increase the amount of money annually invested in IT research and innovation. DIA’s technology budget was typically too bloated on the side of operations and maintenance for current systems, and not investing enough in the future, though during my time there we had made significant progress in redressing that, increasing the resources (people and money) put against “what comes next.”

In government-agencies particularly (and many torpid commercial enterprises also), budgeteers make the mistake of throwing money at legacy systems instead of being bold and prioritizing research for the next generation of systems. (Last year I wrote about these issues in “Moving Money to the Left.”)

Now, no one has asked me about my views on the fiscal “bailout package,” which makes sense, particularly when there are people who make far more sense than me expressing their well-founded opinions in ways I thoroughly agree with – such as, say, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron in his excellent op-ed piece for CNN last night (“Bankruptcy not Bailout is the Answer“).

But a number of people have asked me what the impact on Microsoft might be from the current “crisis” and market volatility.  I have to say that I’m pretty optimistic, precisely because Microsoft is investing in the future, in ways that are designed to carry us through short-term downtimes and on to exciting new platforms.  The company’s cash-rich, which helps. 

 Most importantly, our CEO Steve Ballmer firmly pointed to our increasing bet on our new approaches to the future.  Speaking in Silicon Valley, he said proudly that not only will Microsoft continue to buy about 20 innovative companies a year, but we will also keep spending $9 billion a year, or 14 percent of revenues, on internal research and development. (See the Venture Beat story here.) 

 

Microsoft “will use the slump as a chance to invest more in our future than the other guys we’re competing with” – Steve Ballmer, quoted in Bloomberg.com  

 

There are going to be winners and losers coming out of this slump, as there have been in each of the tech slumps I’ve seen in my short (!) life over the past three decades I’ve been involved.  The winners are inevitably those with a vision for the long term and the determination to plan beyond the horizon. 

Microsoft won’t be the only winner (see “Microsoft, Xerox Invest in Innovation” for a description of the Xerox CTO’s similar thoughts), but I’m convinced we will be in the front rank.

 

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Follow NASA Innovation on Twitter

Yesterday my group hosted a meeting at Microsoft Reston with the ILO Institute on “Innovation in Large Organizations.”  The ILO Institute always brings together great clients (FedEx, Time Warner, SAIC, IBM, US Postal Service) and yesterday was no exception, with an eclectic group from NIH, DoJ, NASA, RTI, GTSI and others. The discussion about that seeming oxymoron – innovation in large organizations – was fascinating, with lively threads about distinctions between Microsoft and Apple for example, and whether the latter is actually a technology company or a fashion company.  [My opinion: its success comes from its fashion/marketing leadership, not technical advances.]