IP: With Stock as Bait, Microsoft Lures Elite Professors

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/TUE/FPAGE/micro.2.html

Paris, Tuesday, April 6, 1999 
With Stock as Bait, Microsoft Lures Elite Professors

By Mark Leibovich Washington Post Service 

REDMOND, Washington - 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 are being picked clean. 

Last month, Microsoft hired Lazlo Lovasz, a mathematician and recent winner of his field's prestigious Wolf Prize, away from Yale University. He will start in June and will join, among others, Michael Freedman, a Fields Medal-winning mathematician from the University of California at San Diego, and Jim Blinn, a MacArthur fellow and computer graphics expert from California Institute of Technology. 

Microsoft Research, known as MSR, is aiming for a ''faculty'' of 600 people by the end of next year. It already is among the biggest computer science laboratories in the world, with 350 researchers.