'Research' at Microsoft has changed, and for the better

Since Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft's CEO in 2014, things have been changing. But it was at a company retreat during his first month that Nadella would radically alter how Microsoft would pursue its future.

Like many companies, Microsoft has its own research division, Microsoft Research, which works on projects that may never see the light of day. For Microsoft, keeping projects developed by 'Research' on the backburner was okay, as these things were never really meant to intersect with its customer-facing products and services. According to Bloomberg, this is how Microsoft set up 'Research':

The company's research group was set up in isolation from the product teams to allow researchers to envision the future without worrying about how their inventions will make money or fit into the company's mission.

It was during the aforementioned retreat that Nadella would be presented with a Research project, which could use speech recognition to translate a conversation into another language in real time. It was at this moment that Nadella wanted to show off this project to the world and requested to have it integrated into Skype and ready to show off at Code Conference. This would eventually find its way to the masses via a translation tool and later surface fully integrated into Skype.

While the above scenario might sound like something commonplace, for Microsoft, it was a complete turnaround that went against decades of conditioning. All the while competitors like Google and Facebook have been utilizing their research teams to harmoniously develop products and services that generally tend to have a good chance of making it to the consumer in some form or another.

It was during this time of seeing a research project come full circle that Microsoft decided to divide and improve its research leg. Microsoft split its research team into two - assigning half of it to a new group called MSR NExT and the other half into a team that is now dedicated to finding more ways to integrate research into the company's products. Since this change we have seen countless examples of Microsoft's research emerging in its products like Windows 10. While this is surely just the tip of the iceberg, it is without a doubt that Microsoft's mindset has changed and the drastically different tools are now sharper.

Source: Bloomberg via Windows Central