Because it gives insight to customers. Makers who don't have an understanding of "Whole of mind" theory won't understand this. Marketers like Seth Godding do, so the line about "... Do you know what most people want? They want you to care ..." is apt.
microsoft research is doing pretty interesting things; i don't think anyone's anti-MS-Research.
windows/msie/office are less fun, on average, than unix/firefox/tex, but don't write the whole company off.
(in much the same way, IBM is big and stodgy (and sold people-counting systems to axis powers and apartheid south africa), but its Text-to-Speech technology is amazing.)
This is digg-bait.