MSR has published lots of great papers but it has not yet replicated the success of PARC or Bell Labs by any means. I am not sure why this has happened, but it has been pretty obvious to everyone in the research community. Google, which came in with a research agenda pretty late, has more or less single handedly pushed the boundaries of industrial research in the last decade.

Funny: back when I was in school, we always used to say that Google publishes mediocre papers with great marketing.

Except when they close entire research labs overnight with practically no notice, corporate-style:

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/innova...

[2] https://thmatters.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/letter-re-closing...

Do they have similar policies with regards to openness as YC's research lab?

MSR publish a lot but try to get patents on potentially valuable research first.

Like literally any research organization or university anywhere today.

Which only makes an organization like YC Research even more valuable of an experiment.

FWIW, as a researcher at a university, it is only my decision whether I apply for a patent or not. In contrast, patenting inventions is an inherent part of the research workflow at research labs such as MSR, Yahoo Research, etc.

MSR publishes continuously, both in journals and in white papers. It is part of the evaluation.

(Source: I work at MSR)

In my experience, MSR researchers publish openly just like people in "regular" academia. I think the main difference is that they are better paid.

But who gets to own the IP ?

MS