Microsoft shifts 70 researchers to software work

By Brier Dudley
Seattle Times technology reporter

In the largest shift of personnel ever from its advanced-research group, Microsoft moved 70 researchers into the Windows division to help improve the company's software-development practices.
The move comes as the company is in the midst of an enormous effort to produce the next generation of Windows, code-named Longhorn, while trying to improve its development process and overcome security and reliability issues with its products.

The new group, the Center for Software Excellence, will create software tools and manage systems that check newly written code for bugs. It will also contribute to the Visual Studio programming toolkit that goes on sale next year.

Microsoft announced the group yesterday at its research division's annual "Faculty Summit," which drew 400 professors from 135 schools in 20 countries to Redmond.

Faculty come to learn about Microsoft's upcoming technology, share ideas and hear from Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and others.

Microsoft has a complicated relationship with academia. It draws on scholarly research and shares some of its own research via published papers and conferences. The company also cultivates support for its products by providing schools with software, grants and curriculum.

Yesterday, the company made other announcements aimed at strengthening the relationship. It created a more formal process for awarding grants and a $1 million endowment program to support computer-science professors' research.

Rick Rashid, a former professor who has run the research group in 1991, said its funding will increase about 7 percent in the coming year. That includes the addition of 50 researchers to its staff of 700 based at labs in Redmond; Beijing; Cambridge, England; and the Bay Area.

Gates and Rashid discussed concerns about the amount of government support for computer and science education, and declining enrollment in graduate computer-science programs.

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