Is it? I suppose I just assumed it wasn't expected to have any impact on the business side of things as they are the only company (again besides IBM) that does research in theoretical computer science. Not only that but they publish all their results in public.
I know that Google also does a lot of R&D but from what I can tell, it's usually directly related to what they are doing.
Re:Microsoft TouchDevelop
by turingbook on Friday May 15, 2015 @12:26AM
(#9548941)
Peter Norvig wrote an article "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/38149.pdf
As far as other tech companies with large R&D budgets, look at Google. However, Google's R&D investment areas are different than MSFT's (apparently they don't do OS research): http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/20/technology/mobile/apple-rd-s...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)