Let's see, dictatorial micro-manager genius who is so obsessive-compulsive that he won't let a product out until he thinks it's perfect. Someone who will infuriate everybody else by nit-picking the tiniest details, including the unboxing experience. Not a product that some geeks wanted to make, not a product some focus groups said would work, but a product -- no, a total user experience -- he'd be proud of to his grave. I certainly wouldn't want to work for him, or even know him, but I'm perfectly happy letting him churn out great product after great product. Let other people get paid the big bucks to put up with his tantrums.
So it's that vs. a chair-throwing monkey boy with no vision whatsoever. I wonder which one produces better products? Oh yeah, the one that's now the most valuable company in the world.
Microsoft Research has come out with some of the greatest tech innovations in the past 20 years:
Microsoft Research has done some great stuff over the years, and your link isn't even the best stuff (PhotoDNA to help police fight child porn certainly belongs in the top 10). But one example of the problem is that MR sometimes works like Xerox PARC -- great stuff, management can't do right by it. Take that gesture mouse from October 2009. Cool stuff. The same month, Apple came out with the beautifully engineered, gesture-controlled Magic Mouse.
Like I said earlier, Microsoft has some very smart people working there. Too bad management sucks.
Google image search is much better. Just drag a photo to the box, drop, and there are where it came from!