Craig Mundie assumed his position as chief visionary at Microsoft in June 2008, after Bill Gates retired from day-to-day operations.
Will belt-tightening require Microsoft to scale back on basic research, as some competitors have? No. We have an opposite view, which is the tighter the economic times, the more the focus has to be on maintaining your R&D investment. You want the normal cycle to produce timely results, but we've always believed that the pure research component was critical to us. It gives us the ability to continue to enhance the businesses we're in [and] to disrupt industries that we choose to enter, [and] it's a shock absorber that allows us to deal with the arrival of the unknown from competitive actions or other technology breakthroughs.
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