Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 10 September 2009 23:50
Opinion and Analysis
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My first interview took place with Phil Fawcett, Microsoft’s Principal Research Program Manager. Phil will be giving the “Locknote”, which is the final closing showpiece of the event, and will be talking about the research and development efforts that Microsoft undertakes while showing some real prototypes for tech that’s still a few years away from retail.
It will be interesting to see what he unveils, which I’ll report on later today, but he did manage to give me a mini sneak peek, while also explaining some of the details around Microsoft’s R&D program.
Currently, Microsoft spends US $9.1 billion on R&D every year, a phenomenal amount but one that has produced winners such as the Surface “coffee table” multi-touch PC and the upcoming Project Natal for Xbox 360 (and presumably one day for PCs, too).
There are several locations for research worldwide, including China, Cambridge, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, the MIT campus and naturally, Redmond itself.
While some of the developments the R&D teams directly end up as new products, a lot of extra work is usually needed to take R&D concepts and turn them into shipping products, software or services.
One example is the aforementioned Project Natal, the camera based motion sensing system that uses the human body as an “input” device for motion control and more, rather than forcing users to hold a controller as is the case with the Nintendo Wii and the upcoming motion controller for the PS3.
Natal was based on vision research from the Cambridge R&D lab, and helps computers to “see like a human being”, able to recognise patterns, gestures, intonation, skin colour, moods, face recognition, speech recognition and much more – with at least 50 different attributes Natal is able to look at.
Natal has even been touted for use in health applications, linking Natal with things like MRI scans in the future. I asked when users might see Natal for PCs, but given Natal is yet to arrive for the Xbox 360 itself, Fawcett was unable to elaborate – he does look after the research side of things after all, not products ready to ship to end users.
When I asked how long it takes for R&D projects to become products, Fawcett said that typically, it took anywhere from four to seven years, but that his teams were always trying to speed up the time to market, where possible, with some labs groups working on technologies that are 1 to 3 years out.
An example given of trying to speed up the R&D process was Microsoft’s video for its
2019 vision on what technology could look like. While this video is set 10 years in the future, Fawcett hopes to bring the technologies seen in this video to users within 5 years.
And while Windows 7 is a large part of Microsoft’s focus right now, with the official October 22 launch date drawing ever closer, Fawcett’s teams are already thinking about what Windows 9 and Office 15 will look like, while the non-R&D product teams work on completing Office 2010 (Office 14) and have already started work on Windows 8.
Indeed, R&D is all about the future, with Fawcett saying the R&D division is about “making sure that we have a future, that Microsoft and its customers have a future”.
Continued on page 3, please read on.
