Comment by boulos

The Seattle / UW related branch of MSR definitely had a few wins in the graphics department.

As https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/meteoric-rise-... reminded me, they were on like 20% of the SIGGRAPH papers in 1996. And several have stood the test of time, like Hugues's Progressive Meshes paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/237170.237216). A little later, the spherical harmonics paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/566570.566612) was basically all MSR (I think Jan maybe interned there while at MPI? It's been a long time...).

That isn't to defend anything in AI, but it's not the case that they had no impact. The oral history thing there claims that the first grammar checking in Office 97 came from their NLP work.