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1.  

   No Subject Given

   

   Anonymous Coward, May 5th, 2005 @ 4:04pm

   
   

   Maybe the ideas aren't worth enough, in Microsoft's eyes, to venture into. They will only develop ideas that will bring in millions of dollars. Maybe these ideas they are licensing are worth a few hundred-thousand. Not a bad deal in my opinion.

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2.  

   Broken RSS feed

   

   tra1a1a, May 6th, 2005 @ 1:07am

   
   

   It seems that this post is breaking the rss feed. This is what firefox is showing me:
   XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
   Location: http://www.techdirt.com/techdirt_rss.xml
   Line Number 61, Column 38: Microsoft Peddles Unused R&D To Eager Startups
   -------------------------------------^
   If the line wrapping breaks it the pointer is directed to the space right after "R&D".

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3.  

   Other Industries do It

   

   Director Mitch, May 6th, 2005 @ 1:10pm

   
   

   Actually, Mike, this is common in other industries, and one in particular, oil exploration, is a good way to make money.
   
   Let's take ExxonMobile. Let's say they have a domestic an exploration budget of $500M that will let them drill 500 domestic wells (just picking round numbers out of my hat). But they have oil leases for 600 wells that will expire this year - meaning that is if they don't drill on them, the leases just expire worthless.
   
   So ExxonMobile does what is called a "farm out" of those extra 100 wells. They give the oil location and data to another oil company who drills it and then get a part of the return if the other company finds oil. This seems somewhat similar to what is being proposed here.
   

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4.  

   Re: Other Industries do It

   

   Mike (profile), May 6th, 2005 @ 1:49pm

   
   

   Mitch, I didn't write the post, but point taken... Still this is a bit different than 100 extra "wells". This is entirely separate research that they decided wasn't worth commercializing. I don't think it's a bad thing, but any startup that goes in for it, needs to realize they're not getting the cream of the crop here.

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5.  

   could be interesting if done the right way

   

   nonuser, May 8th, 2005 @ 2:39pm

   
   

   There's lots of technologies that make great demos, but they seem at least 5 years away from mass market, and even then the market pioneer isn't necessarily going to be the big winner. For example, pen computing was that way in 1990. Anyway, Microsoft isn't set up to capitalize on many of the inventions coming out of their research labs that can't be moved directly into Windows, Office, Xbox, or some other major product.

   This could be a swift move on Microsoft's part if they make it interesting enough for the entrepreneurs, and don't insist on hogging most of the upside for themselves. Imagine if Xerox had done something like this in the '70s.

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6.  

   I hope microsoft does give up some of it's R&D

   

   danrus, May 9th, 2005 @ 7:59am

   
   

   So the beast of redmond finally chokes on some of the smaller projects it swallowed up. There used to be a great add on for IE called e-quill which allowed you to make and share annotations, and freehand drawings on top of web pages. M$ bought the project out and shut the servers down - no sign of that technology being integrated into IE
   
   I still miss the program and it was over 5 years ago it shut down

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