Microsoft Ups Research And Development Budget To $9.5 Billion

A high profile Microsoft executive has announced that the company is planning to shell out a whopping $9.5 billion for research and development in 2010.

In his keynote speech at the Cebit trade expo, Microsoft's chief operating officer Kevin Turner asserted that his company's investment figure in this year's R&D is almost $3 billion more than that of next technology company (ed : possibly IBM).

However, a majority of the software giant's investment would pivot around the "cloud computing" technology, or online computing delivered to users through hosted data centres.

Turner said in a statement: "Especially in light of the tough difficult macroeconomic times that we're coming out of, we chose to really lean in and double down on our innovation". "We're going to change and reinvent our company around leading in the cloud", he added.

He further touted that Microsoft has wider range of cloud computing services than any other company in the industry, with its product range from Azure cloud operating system and Dynamics CRM to simple consumer email service.

Microsoft has come under some serious pressure from companies like Google which sell a host office productivity suites that run completely online, without necessitating users to carry out any installation on PCs.