I understand the downvotes as a knee-jerk reaction, but the thing to understand here is that MS research is largely separate from the product development side.

Spend some time having a look at some of their publications and you'll see what i mean.

Examples

- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/barrelfish/

- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fsharp/

Special mention for this one also:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

Unfortunately it never went anywhere (VERY unfortunately). Also this one more recently:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/

Which might wind up being Microsoft's answer to Docker-like containers.

Singularity has evolved into Midori project but to the latest rumor it was cancelled and the team disbanded.

You do know that fsharp is a pretty big deal for Microsoft and is shipped as part of Visual Studio, one of their biggest products, right?

I don't understand why you and the other person are trying to "correct" them? I thought their point was obvious: MS Research innovates, and then links examples (including F# which goes on to be a successful product as you pointed out).

F# being in full production doesn't disprove what they said, it further proves it.

PS - I disagree with the person above's proposition that MS Research is the "only" innovate branch of Microsoft. I am just posting to get clarification on what you and the other poster are getting at.

F# is not an MSR project anymore.

Yeah, they don't do anything like make innovative wordpad applications for tablets.

Like... inventing basically everything that Apple copies months/years later?

This is the wrong place to speak the truth :). Let me share your down-votes with you.