Geek In Disguise

haven't been able to bring myself to watch it yet Mark. will have words :)

James

well we do have a lot of developers and they're split across product groups but we also have some development in Microsoft Research that becomes products. A nice change from a few years back when not much made it out of the labs. These folks tend to continue to work on similar products as more likely "approaches" to computing science and a look at http://research.microsoft.com will give you an idea of how they come across stuff like this. in Cambridge in the UK for example there are two guys who worked on the gaming algorithms for XBOX Live multiplayer games as part of their research area.

meantime, we have our mainstream product divions that work on things like Windows, Office, XBOX etc all of which have ongoing development and often have sub teams within that work on innovative smaller products that can become mainstream. SharePoint is a good example of this - started out as a small team doing knowledge management (evolving Site Server) and ultimately became the company's fastest growing product ever. for every one of those though there are others which don't make the cut and the teams do something different or move on. Sot of Darwinian in a way.

anyway...hope that helps explain a little!