I really don&#x27;t want to turn this into a Microsoft praise fest but similar to IBM, they&#x27;ve been a net-zero since about Ballmer era, and a net-positive since Satya took over. All of that Microsoft Research papers which silently go unnoticed in Silicon Valley (or published under the MSR, INRIA &#x2F;&#x2F; MSR, Cambridge name and people don&#x27;t do the math) but here&#x27;s a few things MS has been responsible for<p>a: Asynchrony -- the async &#x2F; await paradigm - if you use it in JavaScript it came from C#, which came from a MSR paper (or maybe a Microsoft Languages whitepaper.) A lot of the semantics took a very long time by very smart people to work out the execution logistics, and we get to reap the benefits.<p>b: Haskell -- paying SPJ&#x27;s salary so he can work on Haskell full-time as a MSR Cambridge employee and implement a whole bevy of things like STM[1], the popularization of pure functions (immutable.js users, as well as CLJS)<p>c: Clojure -- if you use Clojure&#x27;s STM, borrowed from work funded by Microsoft. For me, it&#x27;s used every day in Datomic.<p>d: Verifiability -- a mind-blowingly large amount of formal verification stuff - ranging from the first formally verified OS + integrated language, to things like F*<p>e: Z3 -- no need to explain this if you&#x27;re in any sort of reverse-engineering I&#x27;m sure your life has been made significantly easier since MS released this into the public domain<p>f: CoreCLR + the JS engine + their crossplatform 100% free IDE + opening up VS Community (which is about as as VS Professional)<p>g: Probably most importantly -- Well, just go here. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;groups&#x2F;rise&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;groups&#x2F;rise&#x2F;default.aspx</a>. Basically 1 out of 4 things in there is already, or will be imminently, used by &#x27;mainstream&#x27; languages after it moves out of the &quot;only publishing grad students who eagerly wait for POPL every year&quot; zone.<p>[1] I know STM comes from that &#x27;88 paper. I&#x27;ve read it. SPJ did too and brought it into the mainstream, so I give him credit.<p>IBM and Microsoft (and, presumably GoogleX but they havent been publishing) are one of the few corporations I&#x27;m aware of that dedicate more than a few resources to research-for-the-sake-of-research (n.b. MS has been doing this silently since 1991, and IIRC employ more than 100 staff just to produce work to the field of computer science further.)