Kinect itself was first announced on June 1, 2009 at E3 2009 under the code name "Project Natal".[48] Following in Microsoft's tradition of using cities as code names,[10] "Project Natal" was named after the Brazilian city of Natal as a tribute to the country by Brazilian-born Microsoft director Alex Kipman, who incubated the project.[10][49] The name Natal was also chosen because the word natal means "of or relating to birth", reflecting Microsoft's view of the project as "the birth of the next generation of home entertainment".[37]
I don't know if their R&D department has been a net gain, but you need to consider 20 years from they could be making billions from idea that seemed to have been abandoned today.
Something a lot of people forget is that for Microsoft, a research project may culminate in something that's a minor feature to be turned on or off -- a checkbox in a menu buried in a control panel "turn on Chinese Handwriting recognition" or some such, wheras we might think that these things could be entire startups!
Take a look at http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pr/projects.aspx#p=1&#... to see how many of the projects, if successful, will probably just end up as a library with a few API calls, or a series of specifications for hardware manufacturers to go after.
Kinect itself was first announced on June 1, 2009 at E3 2009 under the code name "Project Natal".[48] Following in Microsoft's tradition of using cities as code names,[10] "Project Natal" was named after the Brazilian city of Natal as a tribute to the country by Brazilian-born Microsoft director Alex Kipman, who incubated the project.[10][49] The name Natal was also chosen because the word natal means "of or relating to birth", reflecting Microsoft's view of the project as "the birth of the next generation of home entertainment".[37]
I don't know if their R&D department has been a net gain, but you need to consider 20 years from they could be making billions from idea that seemed to have been abandoned today.