(public).sospep.subjects ~ view article ~ how-microsoft-plans-to-beat-google-and-facebook-to-the-next-tech-breakthrough

<h1 style="text-align: center;">how microsoft plans to beat google and facebook to the next tech breakthrough</h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] by Dina Bass and Jack Clark @bloomberg.com - msft is overhauling how its Microsoft Research division operates in hopes to align its progress with the companies strategic initiatives.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] by Dina Bass and Jack Clark @bloomberg.com - changes to Microsoft's Research division will hopefully more closely align with the companies strategic initiatives.&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
<h2>[WHY]</h2>
<ol>
<li>]&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
<ol>
<li><strong>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</strong></li>
<ol>
<li>]&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-microsoft-research/" target="_blank">http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-microsoft-research/</a></li>
</ol></ol>
<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] 2016-01-25</li>
</ol>
<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] at a msft retreat, new ceo <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Satya Nadella</span> orders <span style="text-decoration: underline;">AI language translation tool</span> to be ready to demo with Skype in 3 months</li>
<li>] Traditionally, not how it usually happened, process of turning msft research projects into "products" was slow/methodical, if it happened at all</li>
<li>] by design, 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.</li>
<li>] Now, Microsoft is overhauling its research arm and the way it works with the rest of the company. The goal is to quickly identify technology with the most potential and get it into customers' hands before a competitor replicates it.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;Microsoft reassigned about half of its more than 1,000 research staff in September 2014 to a new group called <span style="text-decoration: underline;">MSR NExT</span>. Its focus is on projects with greater impact to the company rather than pure research.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] Meanwhile, the other half of <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx" target="_blank">Microsoft Research</a> is getting pushed to find more significant ways it can contribute to the company's products.</li>
<li>] other services that have benefited from the recent transformation include <span style="text-decoration: underline;">cloud productivity tools in Office</span>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">faster and more power-efficient servers</span> running Bing, and the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">augmented-reality headset HoloLens</span>. The latest to come out of this initiative is <span style="text-decoration: underline;">a new feature for Cortana</span>. Microsoft plans to release an update to the digital assistant on Monday that relies on work from the corporate research group. It will give Cortana the ability to scan e-mails for tasks the user has agreed to accomplish and automatically set reminders to do them.</li>
<li>] &nbsp;Google researchers work very closely with product groups, and almost everything they produce is visible to the rest of the company, said Jeff Dean, a senior fellow at Google. "We don't have this really isolated group that is doing stuff without any regard to what might be useful in products," he said. "We have this very porous connection between research and products."</li>
<li>]&nbsp;A similarly ambitious effort at Facebook, aimed at developing a conversational AI assistant called M, was born from research that began in 2014. The company published a paper on its work in October 2014, and by summer 2015 the tech was ready to be tested in Facebook Messenger. Alex Lebrun, who leads development of Facebook M, meets weekly with the company's top AI researchers to explore which lab developments are ready for the world. Facebook employees can track research-in-progress using a tool named FBLearner Flow. It lets them access, copy, and adapt the source code, and then deploy their own versions of the software, said Abdulkader, the Facebook machine learning engineer. "This is how experiments are exposed and shared."</li>
<li>]&nbsp;Today's geniuses often prefer impact over independence, which is partly why Microsoft is rethinking its approach.&nbsp;"There's been a more deliberate focus on leveraging some of the best ideas from Microsoft Research to enhance Microsoft services and products," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft&rsquo;s research group who worked with Ash on Cortana.</li>
</ol>
<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
<ol>
<li>]</li>
</ol>
<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] SRC = HN, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976737" target="_blank">comments</a></li>
</ol>
<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

~ view article ~ Chapter] index FROM [ Book] analysis-software-developer IN [ libraries] technology-developer-software