FT.com: A meeting of Microsoft's minds

FT.com: A meeting of Microsoft's minds "Last year, when most of Microsoft's rivals cut back on expenses, the world's largest software company announced its intention to increase its research and development budget by 20 per cent to $5.2bn (£3.3bn). That is a great deal of money - more, in fact, than the rest of the software industry's R&D budgets combined. But even for a company as large as Microsoft it is an aggressive bet on the future significance of software. ...
The irony is that Mr Rashid has created such an attractive environment that many leading alumni from Xerox Parc have migrated to Microsoft. He hopes that, this time, the benefits of their ideas will be fully realised."