What does $80m buy these days? Not a lot it would seem. That must surely be the conclusion of Microsoft chief executive officer Bill Gates after he splashed out that sum to establish a prestigious research institute in Cambridge, England, last year in a high profile deal (CI No 3,173). Bill Gates is hoping that it will become Microsoft’s answer to Xerox’s Parc Institute in Palo Alto, California, dreaming up new and wacky technologies to convince the cynical that Microsoft is a truly pioneering company. But despite having been up and running for almost a year, the directors of the Institute have still not decided exactly what it is they should be researching. The best they have come up with so far is a system for predicting when an operating system will crash… which should at least come in useful at Microsoft.
