ZDNet published a Q&A with Paul Horn, the head of IBM Research, today. The first question they asked him: Microsoft has a comparatively sized research organization. How would you compare IBM and Microsoft Research?
His answer:
We have a very different corporate culture and corporate focus than Microsoft. IBM would like to think of itself as sort of a major player in the open communities. We really think of ourselves as helping others use our intellectual property and our patents, helping open communities within which we operate and flourish.
Microsoft is sort of where we were at 15 or 20 years ago. They are manically focused on how they will build their next generation of their application suites and how they will maintain the Wintel duopoly and how they will maintain Windows position. That's perfectly understandable given where their company is, but we have a completely different focus.
What a bizarre answer. First of all, the questioner is wrong: According to IBM Research's web site, they have a staff of 3550, vs. Microsoft Research's 700. But that aside... I would think that the most important thing for a research division would be to be a major player in the research community, not this vague "open communities" which I assume is a reference to IBM's support for the open source community, Linux, and their own Eclipse effort. Then, in terms of Microsoft's "manic focus" on the next generation of application suites and WIndows... well, there's MSN, Windows Live, and Office Live, and XBox, and Windows Mobile, and SQL Server, and Exchange... sounds to me like Microsoft is trying to grow all sorts of new products and services.
Here are the questions that the reporter should have asked Horn:
1. How much time do IBM researchers spend begging funding from IBM's lines of business?
2. Given that IBM Research is five times the size of Microsoft Research, why is it that Microsoft Research publishes far more papers in the top peer-reviewed journals and proceedings?
3. How do IBM's researchers feel about being rented out to customers?
4. Why is IBM Research losing so many of their top researchers to Microsoft, Yahoo and Google?
5. So about those 500 patents that IBM made freely available to the open source comunity -- which of them are actually worth anything? How'd you pick them, and if you're so committed to the open source community, what about the other 31,495 patents in your portfolio?
6. You say that your main means of getting disruptive technologies into the company is that you get 8 hours every December to talk to IBM's executive staff about disruptive technologies. What happens if you learn of a new one in January?
7. You say "You can't just do corporate funded basic research or you don't have the channels for the flow of your intellectual property into the marketplace." So aren't you just admitting that you can't "sell" any of your research technologies to your lines of business unless they have already paid for it in advance?
8. Why did IBM Research hand off its academic support programs to IBM's marketing department to be rolled under their "Academic Initiative" marketing program?
Of course, you shouldn't expect to see answers to these questions anytime soon. IBM Research is in a world of hurt these days.
12:05:57 AM 
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