Jeff Raikes, Microsoft Corp vice president of sales and support, laid out how the company’s $3bn R&D budget for the year was split up. Speaking at BaanWorld Europe 98 last week, he said that the ‘Windows platform’ will take up 70%, or $2.1bn of the budget. However, the ‘platform’ includes Windows 98, NT Server, NT Workstation, mobile software, middleware, COM/DCOM and Office 2000 development. The company will spend $300m to $400m on developing interactive media applications, what Raikes described as helping us figure out the e-commerce platform of the future. The remaining $300m or so will go on ‘pure research’ developments that he says are 5 or 10 years away from practical use, such as visual and voice recognition technologies.
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