"Microsoft Research has become a parasite on the academic
establishment," said Jim Morris, chairman of the computer science
department at Carnegie Mellon University. "They are eating our seed
corn. If you take away great people from schools and put them in a
place where they're not teaching anyone, who will train the next
generation?"
Carnegie Mellon's Reddy said that when he complains to his friends at
Microsoft about faculty raids, they seem incredulous. "They always
talk about it being an open market," he said. He jokes that perhaps
Microsoft should just offer $1 billion for Carnegie Mellon.
Microsoft's Myhrvold rules this out, saying, "I would never move to
Pittsburgh."
--RK]
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/05/049l-040599-idx.html
Microsoft Skims Off Academia's Best for Research Center
By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 5, 1999; Page A01
REDMOND, Wash.-The company well known for its aggressive domination
of the software world has set itself a new target: the best minds of
academia. With cash, stock options and the promise of vast resources,
Microsoft Corp. is luring faculty elites to its research center at a
pace so fast that some campus departments say they're being picked
clean.
Last month Microsoft hired Yale University mathematician Lazlo
Lovasz, recent winner of his field's prestigious Wolf Prize. He will
start here in June and will join, among others, Fields Medal-winning
mathematician Michael Freedman, a recent arrival from the University
of California-San Diego; and MacArthur fellow Jim Blinn, a computer
graphics expert from the California Institute of Technology.
Microsoft Research, known as MSR, is aiming for 600 "faculty" by the
end of next year. It already is among the biggest computer science
laboratories in the world, with 350 researchers. While other private
research labs, including Lucent Technologies Inc.'s Bell Labs,
International Business Machines Corp.'s T.J. Watson Research Center
and Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Park, recruited faculty stars
long before Microsoft, no company has raided universities so
brazenly, school officials said. And none has dangled stock options
that have mass-produced so many millionaires.
Microsoft Research is seeking big names in computer science foremost,
but also leading thinkers in graphic arts, linguistics, biology and
mathematics. While they may never write a piece of software, they
could hatch ideas that the company's programmers one day might turn
into big-selling products.
Here on a lush-green campus crisscrossed by shuttle vans painted with
the Microsoft slogan, "Where Do You Want to Go Today?," the software
giant is practicing its "dinner party" philosophy of basic research:
By assembling the right mix of brilliance, eliminating the usual
concerns (teaching, tenure and grant-proposal writing) and leaving
people free to develop ideas, the next wave of great computing could
flow.
But some school officials said Microsoft's elite guest list is
depleting their own.
"Microsoft Research has become a parasite on the academic
establishment," said Jim Morris, chairman of the computer science
department at Carnegie Mellon University. "They are eating our seed
corn. If you take away great people from schools and put them in a
place where they're not teaching anyone, who will train the next
generation?"
Microsoft officials deny they've spurred a university brain drain.
Nathan Myhrvold, the company's chief technology officer, said MSR
probably hires six full professors a year. The rest are junior-level
professors and PhDs. "We haven't taken all that many top people in
all," he said.
Some universities scoff at this, saying that Myhrvold is counting
only fully tenured professors, a shallow measure of a department's
teaching cache. And a few departments have been hit undeniably hard:
Carnegie Mellon, for example, beginning in 1991, when computer
operating system expert Rick Rashid left to become MSR's first
director. Since then, "between 15 and 20 top people" followed, said
Raj Reddy, dean of Carnegie Mellon's computer science school. "You
never can completely recover from this," he added.
Still, Reddy is a member of Microsoft's high-tech advisory board, a
group of deans and department heads -- many of whom, like Reddy, have
been hurt by the company's talent hunt. While seemingly at odds,
Reddy's joint roles underscore the mixed feelings of many in academia
toward Microsoft. On one hand, the company is depleting universities'
staff. But on the other, "Microsoft is not a clear-cut force for
bad," said David Dopkin, Princeton University's computer science
chairman. The company, he said, should be praised for contributing to
basic research at a time when other corporations are cutting back.
Microsoft spends $3 billion a year on research and development.
Carnegie Mellon's total endowment, by comparison, is $600 million. In
recent years, the company has opened basic research labs in
Cambridge, England; Beijing; and Silicon Valley. The main facility in
Redmond, Building 31, has a giddy Nerd-in-Wonderland quality.
Barefoot PhDs mingle with computing legends such as Gordon Bell, the
computing pioneer of the 1960s, who last month was seen fumbling with
an office printer.
Company officials insist MSR is not at odds with the broader goals of
academia. Researchers often retain affiliations to their former
schools and the papers they publish benefit scholarship in general.
Likewise, the company has courted university favor with $80 million a
year in cash and software "gifts." This is not pure altruism.
Microsoft wants university scientists to invent things that will
support its software. (Until the practice was stopped last year,
Microsoft paid faculty members a $200 "stipend" to lecture at
conferences at which their speeches were deemed sufficiently
pro-Microsoft).
While universities might bemoan Microsoft's recruiting drive, no one
is forcing the professors to leave. In fact, they are inundating
Microsoft Research with job feelers , often through former
colleagues. Staff recruiter Steve Clyne said MSR receives 50 to 200
such inquiries a month, and 80 percent of those offered positions
accept.
Base salaries -- well into six figures for senior researchers -- are
on par with those at most major universities. But stock options are
the X-factor, and it doesn't take a Wolf Prize winner to calculate
the profits reaped by Microsoft options-holders this decade.
"Stanford has stolen people from us before, but at least that was a
level playing field," said Princeton's Dopkin, who has lost two top
professors to Microsoft. "[Microsoft] is implicitly saying, 'If you
come here, in a few years, you will probably be a millionaire.' "
Researchers insist they've not been lured merely by wealth. In a
dozen interviews last month, they characterized Building 31 as
research nirvana, where ideas can transcend the numb abstraction of
academia and shape a mass market. Several MSR innovations have found
their way into software. For example, Microsoft Office's "grammar
checker" feature was created with the help of the lab's natural
language group.
"To me, this corporation is my power tool," said Steven Shafer, a
Microsoft researcher who came from Carnegie Mellon in 1995. "It's the
tool I wield to allow my ideas to shape the world."
The abundant resources make for a collegial environment. "Fights in
academia could get pretty vicious because the pie was so small," MSR
cryptographer Josh Benaloh said.
Yet there still is ample pressure. Researchers periodically undergo
reviews from group leaders and managers. They are rated on the
quality of their ideas and papers, how active they are in their
disciplines (what conferences did they chair?) and how well their
work has contributed -- or will contribute -- to the company's
pursuits.
They also must endure a less formal but perhaps more profound
evaluation. It comes from a one-man faculty review board named Bill
Gates.
Two or three times a year, the World's Richest Man holes up in a room
with piles of accumulated reading. Called "think week," Gates uses
the time to devour trade journals, memos and research papers -- many
of them produced in Building 31.
He then volleys e-mail with his researchers. Gates recently argued
with one group on a physics phenomenon called "incipient infinite
cluster," according to MSR mathematician Jennifer Tour Chayes, who
was at the meeting. By the end of the discussion, several white
boards in Gates's boardroom were covered with math equations.
After think week, MSR director Rashid receives a flurry of e-mail
from Gates. "He'll tell me what he's excited about and what he's not
excited about," Rashid said.
If one's work falls in the latter category, it can be demoralizing.
But it's healthy, too, Rashid said. "Bill's an intelligent guy, and
if he has an idea, you might want to listen to him . . . If people
don't tell you you're stupid periodically, you lose your incentive to
try hard."
Building 31 also is not immune from the siege mentality that
generally can mark Microsoft. "We're very much a whipping boy in the
academic community," said senior researcher Dan Weise, who is
exploring new software de-bugging tools.
Microsoft's row with the Justice Department hasn't helped. Weise said
he tries to stay focused on his research, not the antitrust trial. "I
can't help it if our lawyers are clueless," Weise said.
Researchers said the principal difference between Microsoft Research
and universities is the lack of students. Some describe this as a big
relief. Former Carnegie Mellon professor Shafer, for example, said
teaching steals from research time. But others lament the loss and
miss the implicit altruism of teaching in an academy.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm abandoning my duty to students," Benaloh said.
"My annoyance with Microsoft is that there aren't 300 extra great
PhDs waiting to replace the people they steal," Dopkin said.
UC-San Diego math chairman Jeffrey Rennel said the departure of a
faculty star, such as recent MSR hire Michael Freedman, can multiply.
"When you lose a Freedman, you might have 13 or 15 top people under
him whom he'll never teach again," Rennel said. Often, he said, they
leave, too.
Carnegie Mellon's Reddy said that when he complains to his friends at
Microsoft about faculty raids, they seem incredulous. "They always
talk about it being an open market," he said. He jokes that perhaps
Microsoft should just offer $1 billion for Carnegie Mellon.
Microsoft's Myhrvold rules this out, saying, "I would never move to
Pittsburgh."
But a department must learn to reinvent itself, Reddy said, because
Microsoft Research isn't going away. After it took some of Carnegie
Mellon's key robotics and speech-recognition experts, Reddy looked to
new fields. He calls it the "natural order of things."
Now, Carnegie Mellon boasts a widely hailed electronic commerce
institute, where graduate students learn the fine technical points of
business on the World Wide Web. It is a blossoming field and Reddy
realizes that Microsoft is especially interested. They could be
coming around again soon.