I work at Microsoft and we have someone from MSR collaborating with my team daily. I am sure some researchers silo themselves and some engineering teams silo themselves, but I don't think its an accurate blanket statement.

This isn't true, at least for that part of the company. Bing has always had a close connection to a certain part of MSR (e.g. see Harry Shrum).

*Harry Shum

Oops, sorry about that. I'm not really used to that kind of romanization.

Interesting. In other romanizations the name has an "r"?