At least part of the secret is formal verification. MSR throughout the last decade made some big advances in software verification technology. These resulted in more than just academic papers, they were used to find tons of real bugs in MS and external (as part of the driver development kit) source code. There was a point at which all of the biggest names in software verification were either academics or at MSR or at both.

SLAM, Z3, DART were all tools that came out of MSR and have been incredibly influential on the whole field of software verification.