A lot of research done in Microsoft Research is blue skies research that has nothing to do with MSFT's goals. Hell, MSR for the past decade has set the example for open research in industry-controlled labs, so I would have been surprised if MSFT hadn't already started sponsoring theoretical research in STEM subjects.

(This doesn't justify a lot of the crap that MSFT and other tech corps have done to our industry over the years, but we should give credit where it's due)

Ex MSFT Researcher here. It's fun to work at MSR. Not everything done there is valuable, but it is very diverse and you are given pretty much Carte Blanche to fuck around with whatever you want. Just come up with some stuff now and again.

Certainly not a bunch of evil people that's for sure.

Just out of curiosity, why'd you leave? MSR sounds pretty great.

Yes well that was the sad part :P

I was working on Data Visualization at the time.

Then SQL Server decided they wanted data visualization, so they bought the entire team from MSR.

Turned out it was mostly just a way to get headcount. Pretty much everyone left or went off to other projects within six months of the transfer.

I was one of the last ones to stick around in SQL Server but it was totally depressing so I eventually quit.

In retrospect I should have done is to move to a different project in MSR. Oh well.

But MSR was cool!

Dang, that is sad. Data viz research sounds fun and useful. Thanks for the reply!

The connection with quantum information (the theme of research at Station Q) is through the many-body localization (MBL) aspect of this system. These are phases that store quantum information at finite temperature. Normal quantum systems thermalize and lose any information of their initial state. (Actually, the information spreads chaotically throughout the system and becomes hard to retrieve, so its effectively lost.) In MBL systems, the information does not spread, and the system does not thermalize. You can read the information of the initial state back out after waiting a long time.

Furthermore, I can assure you Microsoft isn't the only big tech company interested in 'useless things' like MBL for protecting quantum information.

It's probably a tax write off. If it is then I'd almost prefer it to them paying taxes to be divided out to DOD

Heaven forbid a company tries to save money AND do research…

Where T<1 is the tax rate, spending X on a write-off allows you to avoid paying X*T in tax. But you still end up with X(1-T) less money in the end.

What is your point???

The point is that they are still paying money. Calling it a "tax write-off" to the layman sounds like they're just doing it to reduce how much they pay in taxes. I.e. It sounds like tax-evasion/fraud.

His point specifically is that tax write-offs don't reduce how much you have to pay overall. They may even increase it. They just redirect some of it to other purposes such as research instead of paying taxes.

I think it's great.

We can't rely on only backing certainties (i shouldn't need to say this on a vc related site).

science+luck+money+time+tooling = next gen tech.

The headline of another article linked from the original article: "Time crystals could behave almost like perpetual motion machines"[1]

That could be the reason Microsoft is researching these.

[1] - http://m.phys.org/news/2012-02-crystals-perpetual-motion-mac...

Station Q, where this research occurs, tries to do the basic research to build a topological quantum computer, which if it turns out to be physically possible (which is as far as I know neither proved nor disproved) is considered by many people as a much more scalable approach to build quantum computers than existing ones. The reason (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Topological_quant...) is "The advantage of a quantum computer based on quantum braids over using trapped quantum particles is that the former is much more stable. The smallest perturbations can cause a quantum particle to decohere and introduce errors in the computation, but such small perturbations do not change the braids' topological properties."

Microsoft hopes to be the starters of a similar revolution for quantum computers as there was for "binary" computers.

Though ianai's reason of tax writeoff is probably also a part of the story. :-)