I have a fair bit of respect for Microsoft research lab's and it has also done a fair bit of interesting work in hardware, I was talking about Microsoft as a company in it's totality.
I always viewed Microsoft research labs as a spot of bright light in an otherwise relatively dark company, perhaps that is slightly schizophrenic of me.
Please browse https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ and try to find a comparable resource from anyone else.