At the bottom of the list is a summary of the number of "best papers" by institution. Interestingly, Microsoft Research is at the top of the list:
Microsoft Research 32.4
Stanford University 26.8
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 24.6
University of Washington 24.1
Carnegie Mellon University 22.9
University of California Berkeley 19.5
...
MSR attracts some of the best researchers and makes it easy to get research done. No teaching requirements, grant applications or scrambling for funding. Just research. I sincerely hope tomorrow's Microsoft keeps MSR well-funded, it's a benefit to the whole community.
MSR is very well-regarded, rather autonomous from Microsoft's product division, and likely larger than any university's CS department. It's not much easier to get a principal researcher there than a professorship at a great university.
They're not as broad as most universities, but they pretty reliably have the most papers in top systems conferences like OSDI and SOSP.
True. Even though, first I got confused between papers and patents (they have a tradition of submitting lots of them) and last I wonder if they didn't slow low level research, if not then they keep it quiet, unlike a few years back where they'd talk about they latest PowerPC feats.
