I am still in shock at the news that Microsoft decided to shut down MSR SVC and fire, literally from one day to the next, almost all the scientific staff.

It is shocking that the company decided that it was a good idea to destroy an investment they had made over several years; I am only familiar with the theory side of MSR SVC, which had great success in nurturing young talent and developing breakthrough ideas and results. The work on privacy led by Cynthia Dwork, for example, informed the thinking on privacy of higher management, and on how one could find new ways to balance European privacy law with the data collection necessary for advertising. This is one of the returns of having academic research in a company: not so that they can implement in C++ their algorithms, but so that they can generate and communicate new ways of thinking about problems. (Cynthia is one of the few people retained by Microsoft, but she has lost all her collaborators.) Microsoft’s loss will be other places’ win as the MSR SVC diaspora settles down elsewhere.

It is also shocking that, instead of planning an orderly shutdown, they simply threw people out overnight, which shows a fundamental indifference to the way the academic job market works (it can take a full year for an academic job offer to materialize).

I am not shocked by the class demonstrated by Omer Reingold; the moral stature of people is best seen in difficult moments. Omer has written a beautiful post about the lab, whose comment section has become a memorial to the lab, with people posting their personal remembrances.

Here at Berkeley and Stanford we will do our best to help, and we will make sure that everybody has some space to work. There will also be some kind of community-wide response, but it will take some time to figure out what we can do. Meanwhile, I urge everybody to reach out to their friends formerly at MSR SVC, make them feel the love of their community, and connect them to opportunities for both short term and long term positions, as they weigh their options.