> 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.
Ha, ha! Trust Microsquash to make all the stupid mistakes IBM made, only on a global scale. This is a fine example of Bourdieu's habitus at work -- BillGe (my favorite acronym for everyone's favorite $80 Billion Man) is trying to recreate, for some very interesting reasons, a kind of Bubble Academy, a glassed-in zoo of intellectuals, which he can purchase, house and feed like pets.
The folks who have name recognition are, with a few exceptions, going to be very rich in symbolic capital, but are generally not going to do much in the way of revolutionary innovation. The reason is that the skills used to get to the top of a field are NOT the skills used to revolutionize that field. Microsoft is kidding itself if it thinks that MSR is going to make it some money; the way to make money is to do what hasn't been done, planned or conceived of before. That can only happen in the field, with young, untried, unknown Ph.D. students, energized by the right combination of circumstance and hard work. Why hasn't Microsoft written gems like Quake or Halflife? Why did Valve Software's people *leave* Microsloth to make the best game of 1998?
> 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.
Folks may not know this, but this is a wondrous example of a cultural ressentiment deferred. BillGe is, among other things, a college dropout, who did a stint at Harvard in the Seventies but left to pursue what he and Paul Allen at that time called Micro-Soft (two words). Middle age and family duties are obviously pulling at the heartstrings of the Billster. After all, it'll be time to educate the little Gate-lings in the usual rentier arts -- things like how to thrown lawn parties while leaving the Waltons off the guest list, and all those other difficult tasks. Why go back to your alma mater, when you can pay to have a Virtual Harvard built for you?
> Researchers said the principal difference between Microsoft
> Research and universities is the lack of students.
And that's why MSR will remain an overpriced thinktank, a kind of retirement condo for tenured superstars who long ago started to repeat themselves. Beats working, I guess.
-- Dennis