Inside Microsoft

If you outlayed $9bn a year on investigate and growth and in use 900 of the world's tip P.C. scientists to advance up with new ideas, what would you design in return?

More than a new way of personification video games, a disbeliever might say.

But Microsoft - a firm that might good outlay more on RD than any other business - believes its plan is profitable off, and the explanation is the XBox Kinect system.

On a revisit to the company's headquarters, we had a luck to see a few of the projects that Microsoft scientists at its laboratories in Redmond, in Beijing and in Cambridge, England, think will change the way we see computers.

And the charming thing about what Microsoft's investigate arch Craig Mundie picked to uncover off to a organisation of technology reporters was that roughly all of them entangled Kinect.

The network that turns a player's body in to a games coordinator was created with the help of 7 not similar investigate groups at the company's 3 principal labs, a few working on voice recognition, others on suit sensors and a operation of other technologies.

Now they are seeking at what Kinect could do next.

We saw a network that would enable two people to see not similar images on the same screen, their eyes tracked by the Kinect camera.

Other scientists showed off ways that the camera could takeover objects and people in 3D, that might have applications in future telepresence systems.

And there was lots of work on avatars, for use in possibly games or in video-conferencing. Two Chinese researchers demonstrated a photo-realistic discussing head - sort in a few content and he'll say anything you want, flashing and relocating roughly similar to a actual person.

Craig Mundie says the success of Kinect, that racked up 8m sales in its initial 60 days, is explanation that the perfect scale of Microsoft's RD plan is profitable off.

"Microsoft is at a indicate where many of the things that we've been researching for twenty years are starting to increase up and create solutions," he says. "You can't rest on two guys in a garage to make all the changes, a few of these things need a outrageous amount of technology and a lot of scale."

But Microsoft desperately indispensable a strike from its investigate labs.

Ever given Bill Gates motionless 20 years ago that the firm would outlay large bucks on perplexing to see in to the future, there have been ideas aplenty but few mount out products. A decade ago, for instance, Gates was display off inscription computers - but it took Apple and its iPad to make them mainstream.

Peter Lee, who runs the Redmond lab, says the investigate operation has a far-reaching remit, from traffic with present fixes to stream products to blue-sky thinking.

Professor Lee, who assimilated Microsoft final year after a renowned educational vocation and a spell at the US counterclaim agency DARPA, insists the labs are having an effect on a every day basis.

He cites the grant to what he describes as the "holy fight in search", the fighting between Google and Microsoft's Bing.

"Hour by hour we have a large organisation of researchers actively entangled in Bing, all the time adding new investigate advances in to the product."

But he thinks the long-term investigate is similarly important.

"Some call it navel-gazing, we call it pulling back the frontiers of human knowledge," he says with a smile, presaging that his lab will one day win a Nobel prize.

His team leader Craig Mundie is Microsoft's large thinker, charting the trail of its future research. His stream craving is what he calls innate user interfaces, new ways of interacting with computers, of that Kinect is one example.

There is, he says, a change about to come about from the aged graphical user interface to a direction where "the P.C. is more similar to us - it sees, it listens, it speaks, it understands, it even seeks to do things on our behalf."

It is an appealing vision, but here's a sobering fact. All these intelligent ideas, chic people, and leading investment have not stopped Microsoft from being overtaken in the final year in conditions of marketplace worth by Apple, that seems to concentration on the patron experience now, rsther than than 5 years down the line.

Big, sleepy, and dull, we referred to to Mr Mundie, is how many people right away understand Microsoft.

"We do not feel large and exhausted or dull," he responded, "but if people understand us that way we think seeking at the things that Kinect brings should change that view."

And he insists that firms that do not have the calm to outlay on long-term investigate will remove out in the end.

"I do not think any firm is going to overcome over a long period of time in giving good business returns, if they aren't creation these kind of investments. They'll advance and go in a era if they do not have the staying power that's constructed by having actual command of the underlying technologies."

Microsoft, that still generates outrageous revenues from its core products, Windows and Office, can good means to keep spending on its blue-sky thinking. But having done such a large gamble on science, it will be anticipating that the forthcoming years will create more Kinects, and fewer inscription PCs.