Microsoft Singularity : why closed

Our labs are unique among corporate research facilities in that they balance an open academic model with an effective process for building research results into product development. This approach, unique among corporate research facilities, pays off for Microsoft as enhancements to virtually every product and service it offers and as entirely new lines of business for the company. At the same time, it produces significant technological and intellectual advances across the spectrum of computer science.

from: Inventing the Future of Computing Second you need to see how these ideas are translated into current projects.

Windows 7. The latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system incorporates a number of “under the hood” technologies from Microsoft Research that contribute to the product’s improved performance, reliability and usability. These include enhancements to handwriting recognition, graphics performance, networking and security. Additionally, the product development team made use of a number of Microsoft Research technologies to write and test code efficiently and more thoroughly identify potential security issues.

See: Bringing Innovations to Life and Making Computers More Capable and Useful Lastly you need to understand that Singularity has been used as a springboard for other projects:

Microsoft describes Singularity as a research project “which demonstrated that modern programming languages and software engineering techniques could fundamentally improve software architectures.” Singularity ended up spawning and/or influencing a number of other operating system research projects at Microsoft, including Barrelfish, Helios, Midori (Wikipedia) and Drawbridge.

from The father of Microsoft’s Singularity OS moves on