Talking research with Microsoft's Rick Rashid
Q & A
By Chris Gaither
Boston Globe Staff
9/23/2002
Rick Rashid, 51, serves as Microsoft Corp.'s senior vice president for research. Reporting directly to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Rashid oversees five research labs scattered across three continents. His 700 employees range from psychologists studying computer usage to software programmers working on new features for future versions of Windows to physicists exploring the depths of theoretical computer science. He spoke in Microsoft's San Francisco office last week with Globe Staff writer Chris Gaither.
Q. One of the things that Microsoft's critics like to say is that Microsoft is very good at taking other people's ideas and making money off them. Is it your job to prove them wrong?
A. Well, we're pretty good at taking our own ideas and making money off them, too. If you look at a lot of the technologies that are the heart of Microsoft today, a lot of those things came out of Microsoft research.
Q. Can you give me an example of a product that began in the research labs and made its way into a full-fledged Microsoft product?
A. There are a variety of different examples I could draw on. If you look, for example, at what is now the digital media division that produces the [Windows] Media Player, that was a group that I started in 1993. We spun them out into a product organization in 1996 and they started delivering products after that. Microsoft was not in that area before. We didn't have a media player, we didn't have any of the technology there. It started in the research group. Even today, many of the individual pieces of technology that become part of that product come from that group.
Q. How pragmatic is your job? Are you allowed to go on pie-in-the-sky kinds of projects?
A. The way we judge what we do is: Are we moving forward the state of the art in the areas in which we do research? We judge ourselves first and foremost on our publication in peer-reviewed literature. Honestly, we run ourselves much more like a university computer science department than, I think, people's normal ideas of an industrial research lab. We do work closely with the product teams, but you can't have the kind of impact from a basic research group that you want to have unless you are able to be at the forefront in the fields that you work in.
Q. Are there particular projects that you're throwing more resources toward?
A. We're putting a lot of energy into user-interface technologies and improving the user's experience. We have a lot of people working in areas like natural language and speech - natural input, if you want to think of it that way. We have people working on new kinds of devices for user interfaces, things like very large displays that would allow you to have huge amounts of information not just directly in front of you but in your peripheral vision on both sides. Surround you with information. We're looking at the social dynamics of human interaction, and how can we improve the use of computers as a tool for people to communicate with each other. How can we improve, for example, distance education or online meetings and really create an environment where people trust each other better than they do today?
Q. Is it difficult to decide what is a Microsoft problem to tackle?
A. No. Our research is in computer science, and what I've found is that almost anything we do in our research group can find some applicability in our products. Microsoft has a very broad range of products. ... There's very little that you would do in a computer science research setting that you couldn't leverage through some product group at Microsoft. Even some of our very theoretical work, I've found, makes it into our products. We have a group that does very long-range work in theoretical computer science, statistical physics, discrete mathematics. It's a great group. They've got a Fields Medallist and a Wolf Prize winner. One of their researchers just won the Godel Prize. And yet some of that work has actually influenced things like the algorithms that are actually used in our Windows products.
Q. You've mentioned quite a few award winners. Is it hard to persuade that caliber of scientist to work for a company as large as Microsoft? Are they afraid that they're going to get buried in a corporate bureaucracy?
A. It's actually almost the opposite. When I first started Microsoft research in 1991, it was really hard to convince people to come. ... The reality is that Microsoft then was a very small company. People worried that the longevity of the company would not allow them to do their long-range research. So they looked at software companies and said, `Gosh, software companies don't seem to last a long time. How do we know that Microsoft is going to be here five years from now?' In fact, there was a good friend of mine from a university who I was trying to convince to come. We actually entered into a bet: He believed that Digital Equipment Corp. was still going to be here 10 years later, but that Microsoft wouldn't. ... I have this check on my wall that says, `To Rick, 25 cents,' and it has a little memo, `Rick was right.' ... Once we got a good team in place, and as the trajectory of the company showed to people that it was going to be around to do basic research, it became easier. In fact, the more good people you have, the more great people you have. The more great people you have, the more great people you can hire. It's a little bit like gravity: People bring other people in.
Q. Has Sept. 11 changed your focus at all?
A. Certainly, the whole issue of Trustworthy Computing [Microsoft's computer security initiative] and security are more important now than they were a year ago, not just because of Sept. 11 but because of the greater amount of hacking activity on the Internet. ... But basic research is best when it's not directed from above, or directed from specific events. Yes, maybe ideas can come from something, and when they do that's great. But ultimately your goal is, [if] you're the expert in the field: How can I make things better? How can I solve problems that weren't solved before?
This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 9/23/2002.
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