Microsoft Research is one of the few real, non-university research institutions in the United States. No matter what you think of Microsoft products, the research they do is first class. In the olden times, a few decades ago, there were many industrial research labs that did science for the sake of science and not as an adjunct to product development. Sadly, those days are mostly gone. No more Bell Labs, no more DEC SRC, and so forth. Microsoft Research is one of the exceptions.
It's good to see that a large research institution like Microsoft Research realizes that having your papers freely available on the web is a good way to give it some visibility.
No, it's just a list. Look at http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1521... for example, no full-text download. It's sad, because most publishers allow authors to post a self-generated version of the text (i.e., the Latex output you generate yourself, vs. the official typeset journal print).
There are some great research papers in here, many of which have been turned into MS products. AJAX Scope in particular is a really cool idea, though it isn't clear to me if anyone is actually using the Visual Studio plugin they built after writing that paper.
[cross-posting from the Googlers publication thread ...]
I also noticed that someone recently posted a list of publications by Microsoft Research (MSR), presumably to contrast with Google's publication list. MSR does some amazing academic research, but it's not a fair apples-to-apples comparison to compare their publications with Google's, since the primary output of MSR is academic research papers (that's why the lab was founded!), while the primary output of Google is free web-based consumer products :)
