IP: More on With Stock as Bait, Microsoft Lures Elite Professors

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

>From: Ed Lazowska <lazowska@cs.washington.edu>
>To: "'farber@cis.upenn.edu'" <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>
>Dave --
>
>I'd like to provide a comment regarding the Washington Post story.
>
>Disclaimer:  I've been a member of the Technical Advisory Board for
>Microsoft Research since its inception in 1991.
>
>With that said, I found the article to be extraordinarily one-sided.  Yes, a
>number of us have lost faculty to MSR, and these were great people who meant
>a lot to our programs and who will be hard to replace.  But overall, MSR
>employs only about 40 people who had once been faculty members, out of a
>total of 400 researchers.  And overall, each of us has lost far more faculty
>members to other academic institutions than to MSR.  (Let s/he who has not
>tried to poach from another academic department cast the first stone!)
>
>Further, the fact is that Microsoft has built one of the world's truly great
>computing research organizations -- an investment that is essentially unique
>among Microsoft's contemporary companies.  Further, the company is helping
>to drive the field forward at a time when these sorts of investments are
>desperately necessary because of the consistent failure of the Federal
>government to invest adequately.
>
>I think many of those quoted in the Post article would tell you that the
>reporter took their remarks out of context, presenting only the negative.
>I'll give you my own experience.  I spent 45 minutes on the phone with the
>guy.  Not a word of it made it into the article.  Nor did he follow up with
>another phone call as he had said he would.  (We were interrupted when he
>got another call.)  Having seen the article, it's clear why I was dropped
>like a hot potato:  what I had to say didn't fit with the reporter's
>pre-conceived notions and agenda.  In retrospect, I was one of the lucky
>ones -- at least I didn't get quoted out of context!
>
>One more comment:  I honestly don't think any truly top flight researcher is
>going to go to a lousy research environment just because of stock.  We're
>all in this business for impact.  There are lots of ways to achieve impact.
>Educating students is one way -- it happens to be the one that I personally
>find most fulfilling and am most effective at.  MSR offers its own form of
>impact and leverage.  People go to MSR because it represents an opportunity
>for impact, not because of the stock.
>
>This sort of unbalanced reporting -- no matter what the subject -- ought to
>be an embarrassment to the Washington Post.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Farber [mailto:farber@cis.upenn.edu]
>Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 1999 8:10 AM
>To: ip-sub-1@admin.listbox.com
>Subject: IP: With Stock as Bait, Microsoft Lures Elite Professors
>
>
>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.