external. The IT industry, Lee says, “is going through many, many changes and is ripe for disruptions.” At the same time, basic research in computer science is peaking “beyond anything that I have seen in my career. There’s so many amazing things coming out. The convergence of all of the changes in the IT industry with this surge of optimism and excitement in the basic research community is something that I think will really define the next decade.”
The bottom line for his organization, Lee says, is that the rest of Microsoft “more than ever is really depending on research to come through.”
A New Balance
So how does Lee intend for Microsoft Research to pull this off? The idea has always been to leverage MSR’s relatively small position in a huge organization by looking out farther into the future than other parts of the company can afford to do, preparing executives for what is coming down the pike, and blazing new trails in computer science that might be beneficial to Microsoft. That includes taking some “wacky” (Lee’s word) chances that aren’t possible elsewhere in the company but may lead to disruptive new products or even new business lines.
But at the same time, Lee says, MSR must also feed innovations more directly into product groups, helping the company’s existing and soon-to-be-released products and services keep up with, and hopefully ahead of, what competitors are doing.
Maintaining the balance between helping with the here and now, while also taking chances on things farther down the road, has always been the challenge for Microsoft Research (and any other corporate research organization). But now that balance is changing. Lee didn’t quite say it outright, but that almost assuredly means shifting more to the shorter-term and away from riskier, long-term efforts. “In the new Microsoft, MSR is being called on to lead technical developments much more,” is one way he put it.
This, by the way, is not unique to MSR. Research arms at IBM, Xerox, HP, you name it, have all shifted this balance in recent years, and continue to do so. Nor is it the first time Microsoft Research has shifted. My sense, though, is that MSR is undergoing a more profound rebalancing than in the past. The next three sections provide more on Lee’s approach to striking this new alignment:
The Quadrants of Research
Lee describes research as consisting of four basic elements that he graphs out as quadrants on an X-Y scale. The X axis represents time, from short-term research on the left to long-term on the far right. The Y axis is based on how directed research is. It runs from what Lee calls reactive problems, meaning they are directly in reaction to business needs or problems, all the way up to open-ended. The upper right quadrant, therefore, represents blue sky research, less tied to any particular business need, less directed, and with the longest time horizons. The lower left is the most close in and closely coupled to business needs. Lee calls this “mission-focused” research. On the upper left is disruptive research. This is shorter-term than blue sky efforts but can be just as open-ended: it is potentially disruptive and therefore different than mission-focused work on current products. The lower right, with a longer time horizon than the mission-focused or disruptive quadrants, is called sustaining research. This typically means continuous, iterative improvement in what has already been done, taking things to the next level, so to speak.
That is my summary, anyway. Here is Lee’s own chart, and you can find a description of these quadrants in his own words.
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Some key points Lee made about this matrix in our interviews:
—Every manager inside MSR must have a strategy for all four quadrants, and “give me something to brag about in each quadrant.”
—No individual researcher can work only in one quadrant. This guards against researchers being too narrowly focused, and therefore missing key opportunities, like, say, when longer-term work might provide a breakthrough or key ingredient for shorter-term work—and vice versa. Plus, Lee says, “Being too mission-focused ends up limiting people’s imagination.”
—“My assessment is that without any direction from senior management, MSR has put more resources into the bottom left quadrant, the mission-focused quadrant.”
—“From my perspective it’s not a bad thing for MSR to be very important in mission-focused activities for the company.” However, “it would be wrong if MSR were to go 100 percent mission-focused. In fact, if that were to happen, there would be no reason to have MSR at all.”
Putting those last two bullet points together, I concluded that there is definitely a directed shift to more mission-focused research. Now what are some of the ideas that have Lee most excited?
Deep Neural Nets
First on his list was the field of deep neural nets, which can be thought of as a kind of unifying theory of artificial intelligence—in Lee’s words,
