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Microsoft opens 6th lab for fundamental research.

Article Excerpt
From 1978 to 1987, three pairs of industrial scientists won an award that recognizes the essence of basic research: the Nobel Prize in physics. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs shared in the 1978 award; while trying to explain faint background noise in a sensitive antenna, they had discovered the cosmic microwave radiation that has coursed throughout the universe since the Big Bang. Eight years later, a share of the prize went to IBM researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for their development of the scanning tunneling microscope, a device that enables studies of solid surfaces at the atomic scale. And in the following year IBM garnered an almost unprecedented repeat when J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alexander Muller won the award for their discovery of high-temperature superconductors.

The prospect that any industrial researchers will echo those feats has dimmed considerably in the past two decades. Corporate R&D centers have increasingly focused their attention and their budgets on product development to the exclusion of research into basic scientific principles that promises commercial reward only on a long-term basis, if any. But the tradition of corporate fundamental research has not yet died....

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