Open Innovation: New Corporate R&D Strategies

A short article on how Microsoft, IBM, and HP are shifting research strategies.

Pundits in recent years have taken to bemoaning a retreat by U.S. industry from basic research in science and technology. And indeed, it's easy to cite research labs whose glory days have come and gone -- Bell Laboratories comes to mind. But consider this: IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard together spend $17 billion annually on research and development.

from: The new face of R&D: What's cooking at IBM, HP and Microsoft

Row Limit You Ask?

As much as I love Excel 2007 (finally an easy way to save your graphs into templates!), I cannot believe they still enforce a row limit. A "row limit" you ask? Surely not, I mean, it is after all 2007--the years of mandating artificial limits of data sizes are long over, no? Unfortunately not. Excel 2007, row limit=1,048,576.

Um, why?

I'd like to think it's because Excel's dev lead programmed int [] rows = new int[1048576] at the top of the Excel document model.

Last Day at Microsoft Research

I Said, "No Negative Values"

I selected "Logarithmic scale" on an Excel 2007 graph that contained negative data points (which I didn't realize until it was too late). I was told in a not-so-subtle manner that this is a bad thing. Needless to say, I was graphing about 12,000 data points--only about 500 of which were negative. I would guess that this is also the number of error dialogs that popped up.

Should I select the "Was this information helpful?" link? Microsoft certainly seems to think so. I guess they're not really following the adage: less is more.

I'm going to start clicking OK on these babies--probably be done in about an hour.