Meet Microsoft, the world's best kept R&D secret
"Redmond spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future."<p>Two words, Xerox PARC.<p>At Sun there was a weird joke that Sun Labs was where good ideas went to die. It was frustrating.<p>The point here is that good R&D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work. Strangely the hardest thing about that is <i>not</i> making a product out of it, the hardest thing is making a product you can ship.<p>Good R&D isn't constrained, which is to say that you don't tell the folks doing the research you are only researching things we can sell for a profit, but that is a constraint on products. What happens is the 'Apple effect' where you have a bunch of researchers who can't make a profitable product (Xerox Star) and then a product guy comes along (Steve Jobs) who sees the essence of the innovation, and can strip away the parts where it goes too far and ships that.<p>Its really challenging to build something close to your vision and not ship it, it seems like it is impossible to build something that is close to your vision and then ship something only half as close as that. But that is where the success can be. "Fumbling the Future" [1] is a fascinating read for that reason.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...</a>