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Microsoft, clearly a bit jealous of the gratuitous geeky kudos being garnered by Google X, has set up its own secretive Special Projects group. The group is being headed up by Norman Whitaker, previously a deputy director at DARPA. Not much is known about the Special Projects group, but a job listing says it will be tasked with “working on disruptive technologies that could benefit the company and society.” So far, Microsoft has declined to officially comment on this new group — presumably it’s waiting for a big New York Times expose, just like Google X.

This whole endeavor reeks of public relations. Microsoft Research, founded way back in 1991 and headed up by computer science luminary Peter Lee, is one of the most prolific and best-funded R&D groups in the world. You could easily argue that Microsoft Research has already been working on disruptive technologies for more than two decades. Some of the coolest innovations that we’ve covered on ExtremeTech have come from Microsoft Research, including IllumiRoom, PhotoSynth, see-through 3D displays.

Presumably, at least as far as the PR department was concerned, those technologies just weren’t disruptive enough — or rather, the company wasn’t doing a good job of communicating why those technologies were disruptive.

It isn’t unusual for a big, old company like Microsoft to have these kinds of PR issues. IBM and Samsung, two of the largest and most innovative companies in the world, are so large and labyrinthine that they really struggle to communicate directly with consumers. Microsoft, Samsung, and IBM are quite literally churning out thousands more patents and new technologies per year than Google or Apple — but without the requisite PR, marketing, and fanboyism to back them up, very few of these innovations will ever appear in the New York Times or on your favorite tech blog.

With the Special Projects group, Microsoft is probably trying to underscore the fact that it too is working on crazy moonshots like self-driving cars, space elevators, and teleportation. A source tells ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley says that the “similarity [to Google X] is intentional.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the Special Projects group actually takes some existing Microsoft Research projects and subsumes them, so that Microsoft PR can give them a sexier, more secretive spin. I can just see it now: