http://news.microsoft.com/stories/building87/Take a virtual tour of Building 87. To do it justice, make sure you have a few minutes to look around. Pretty fascinating stuff.
Some of us had a tour of this place at a Summit many years ago - back around the time when Microsoft was researching its routers. I remember seeing a prototype Microsoft mouse being "printed". Way before 3D printers, and it wasn't plastic. It was using lasers (I don't remember exactly), and it would take overnight to complete. But you could see the prototype being built, layer by layer.
I can't remember the full name of the engineer who showed us around. A very nice fellow, Mark something (not Russinovich, he wasn't there yet). Mark was also in charge of the software development for the routers. I don't know if any of you remember those early router days - nobody set up a secure router by default, and it was difficult and tedious to do. Microsoft research labs wrote software that set your router up with encryption by default, letting you put a passphrase in during setup. It was a wizard that set you up with security in place. No one else did that. No one else had the money for the kinds of research Microsoft was doing at that time. So they did it, made the product, everybody copied it, then they quit making them. They just wanted to get the tech out there, as it was in their best interest for everyone to have (in this case) secure routers.
