At Microsoft Research's open day at Cambridge University, it wanted to clearly elaborate its slogan of "Turning Ideas into Reality" by heavily promoting another byline: "Fundamental research helps generate new technologies that give companies competitive advantages."

In other words, Microsoft Research is justifying its very existence by proclaiming its importance to the IT industry's continued growth and its relevance to the evolution of technology. In some contexts, Microsoft Research's assertion is indisputable. For instance, if Intel closed its research facilities, it would crash and burn overnight. But would the same thing happen to Microsoft if it ever stopped doing research? Based on the event, the answer appears to be a resounding "No".

Regardless of how fascinating the ideas put forth in the Cambridge meeting were, they did not acknowledge Microsoft's main dilemmas or even any of its minor ones. The research that was being conducted for Microsoft's sake begs the questions of relevance and consequence. They were able to fund studies for low-power network hardware, for displaying networks of influence, for capturing people's lives as a timeline, and for ecological systems, but even the experts would be hard-pressed to compellingly relate any of those topics with any conceivable Microsoft strategy.

Contrast this with Intel, where you can see the impact of their research by their continued innovation. For instance, a solid-state physicist from Intel can come up with a groundbreaking transistor design that, only three years later, would end up being a major part of Intel's processor strategy. That's applied and relevant research. With Microsoft, it's hard to see the significance or application of their research. The link between bright idea and bottom line is tenuous, at best.

More to the point, Apple had an archetypal operation in its Apple Research Labs that did well in the fields of human-computer interaction, data recognition, networking, and so forth. It was a highly esteemed research laboratory whose influence can still be felt up until now—for instance, the evolution of QuickTime and many other ideas spread throughout Apple's software development and the Internet. The lab ran for a decade and a year before the returning Steve Jobs shut it down in 1997.

If Apple was able to survive without its research labs twelve years later, then Microsoft can conceivably do the same. The reason for this is because big company research is not mainly about science and technology, but about marketing. As a marketing tool, Apple didn't need its research labs, and the same could be said for Microsoft's research labs purely in terms of the products it makes.