Examples of Technology Transfer

The main feature that differentiates corporate research labs like MSR from academic labs is a commitment to technology transfer—that is, ensuring that research finds its ways into consumers’ hands in the form of products.

No formal process exists for incorporating MSR’s work into products at Microsoft. In some cases, individual researchers convince the appropriate product group to incorporate specific advances in their area of research, as in the following examples:

• Improvements in digital audio and video codecs, which have been incorporated into Windows Media Technologies. (For background on the upcoming version, see “‘Corona’ Aims to Improve Streaming Media” on page 13 of the Feb. 2002 Update.)
• The Direct X API, which helps developers write games with sophisticated graphics for PCs and the Xbox.
• Advances in data mining and OLAP, which were largely driven by researcher Usama Fayad (now CEO of DigiMine) and then incorporated into SQL Server. (See “OLAP Breaks Ground for SQL Server“