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Unless you're willing to call the government "nu liebour", suspect the council is spying on you via your wheelie bin or harbour an irrational fear of the Guardian women's pages, the BBC's Have Your Say pages are a perilous place for any reasonably minded person to dally. As we've previously pointed out (guidebranes) but worth mentioning again, spEak You're bRanes helps navigate this honeypot of insanity, to find that the proposed giant Kent horse has "an Arab-looking head", or that our "once great nation has been brought to its knees by PC mania". Once you tire of the comments, press the Twat-O-Tron for a depressingly realistic computer-generated one.

Sony chief executive Sir Howard Stringer has won a significant battle in his quest to rebuild Sony as a global consumer electronics superpower, announcing yesterday that he will take over from Ryoji Chubachi as president.

The move, which leaves Stringer firmly in control as Sony braces for a first operating loss in 14 years, mirrors executive shakeups at other corporations hit by a slump in demand. The 67-year-old Welshman, who is also chairman, said the reorganisation "is designed to transform Sony into a more innovative, integrated and agile global company with its next generation of leadership firmly in place".

Chubachi will become vice-chairman from 1 April. Sony claimed the changes would "fundamentally reorganise the company's games and electronics business to improve profitability and strengthen competitiveness in the midst of the continued global economic crisis".

Stringer announced the creation of two business groups, headed by younger executives, to break down the "silos" that have prevented full integration of the company's hardware and software, and to devise "cool new products" that will appeal to digital-savvy young people.

"[The changes] will now make it possible for all of Sony's parts to work together to assume a position of worldwide leadership and, together, achieve great things," he said. Analysts said the personnel changes were another sign of Stringer's growing impatience with the slow pace of change at Sony, where, he complained recently, "there is still a lot of the old and not enough of the new". Although he oversaw dramatic improvement in the electronics business in 2007, Chubachi is believed to represent a traditionalist faction at Sony that has hampered Stringer's radical cost-cutting efforts since he became its first foreign head, in 2005.

The changes follow rumours of discord between Stringer and other executives over Sony's direction amid plunging earnings and thousands of lay-offs. The maker of PlayStation game consoles, Bravia flat-screen TVs and Cyber-shot digital cameras has shed 8,000 of 185,000 regular jobs, laid off 8,000 temporary workers and closed about 10% of its 57 factories.

Sony said last month it expected an operating loss - its first for 14 years - of ¥260bn (£1.9bn) for the financial year ending in March.

For nearly 18 years, Rick Rashid has been the man with a unique window into Microsoft's future.

As the company's senior vice president of research, he is responsible for an important part of the software corporation's mammoth research and development operation.

Microsoft spends more on R&D than any other company in the technology business; last year the spend ran to more than $8bn – four times that of Google and around 10 times greater than Apple's equivalent budget.

While most of that vast sum is spent on developing products and supporting thousands of independent developers and partners, Microsoft Research also supports some 850 individuals investigating new systems and technologies – the labs under Rashid's control.

This week those researchers had the chance to show their wares at TechFest, an annual event which aims to highlight some of their work.

"The way we work is that we hire the best people we can, we give them a lot of freedom and an environment where they can be really productive," Rashid told the Guardian. "Really, they're experts in their own field – and every field of research has its frontier, and there are often soft spots where you think you can make progress if you push really hard."

Microsoft's senior executives certainly hope that Rashid's latest crop of researchers come up with the goods.

It is a tough time for the software giant: shares are at their lowest point since the mid 1990s, and last month it decided to cut thousands of workers for the first in its history after financial results started to slide.

That background put a distinctly different spin on this year's TechFest, marked by a day of public demonstrations that will be followed by several days of internal meetings where researchers try to transfer their projects on to more commercially-minded teams within the company.

Some of the ideas on show were impressive – among them a system that can stitch together multiple camera angles to create real-time panoramic videos; or the science fiction-style SecondLight, a technique that can project extra layers of information onto an image when you want them.

But not everything captures the attention so easily. A significant proportion of Microsoft Research work never makes it into the public's hands, while other work takes much longer to reach fruition than expected.

"There are technologies which seem to take a really long time," he said. "When I first got to Microsoft, one of the first projects I worked on was interactive TV systems. It was very sophisticated, everything was great. We built it, we deployed it, people seemed to like it – but it never went anywhere. It wasn't the right time."

"I really felt that was going to take off 10 or 13 years ago, and it's taken a long time – but it's finally having the kind of impact I thought it would."

But even when research does break into the mainstream, one criticism often levelled at Microsoft is that much of its work appears closely related to of rivals – so-called "me-too" work that mimics somebody else's work.

Whether or not it is intentional, it did appear true on at least a few occasions at TechFest.

One project which seemed impressive was a scheme to improve email by applying social networking theories to your inbox activity. It is a neat concept, but one that appeared to take more than a few cues from Xobni, a well-regarded startup which Microsoft reportedly tried, and failed, to buy last year.

In a similar vein was GeoLife, a location-based social networking application that uses the GPS in your mobile phone. The system, developed by Beijing-based researcher Yu Zheng, is smart – but the concepts seem very similar to projects already well underway at Google, Yahoo and elsewhere.

It is difficult for when other companies seem to turn their research into highly effective products, like Apple, or have an uncanny ability to catch the public's attention, like Google.

Ultimately, says Rashid, such crossovers are inevitable in a world where some trends are more obvious than others – and will be judged on their merits since Microsoft's researchers publish their work in the same way as traditional academics.

"People who make consistently good choices we reward, and people who make consistently bad choices we get rid of," he said. "I'm talking about people who aren't doing the things that make people successful in research – people who are just not able to produce at that level."

"It's not difficult to tell when someone's being successful or if they're not – especially when they have to run the gauntlet of peer review."

Those may sound like stern words – but despite the tough times ahead, Microsoft shows no sign of backing away from research spending.

Indeed, Rashid's underlings received a timely message of support from chief executive Steve Ballmer yesterday, who said the company had no intention of reining in its research and development spending during the downturn.

In fact, Ballmer said, it was quite the opposite: Microsoft has been looking at which businesses coped with the Depression of the 1930s, and is modelling itself on RCA - which continued investing during the worst years and emerged strongly as the American economy began to recover.

It is true that you rarely hear anyone in technology say otherwise – the mantra of "investing in the future" is heard across the entire industry – but Microsoft remains more bullish than most.

Rashid's boss Craig Mundie, took a moment to point out that he wasn't looking at getting short term results - but trying to understand how people would be using PCs, mobile phones and other devices in five years.

"The thing we'll work the hardest to preserve is our research and development spending," he said. "While it may go flat, I doubt it will go down – or at least not in any material way."

Monty Python's decision to let viewers watch free clips of its content on YouTube has paid off for the British comedy act, sending sales of its DVD box-set soaring within days, according to the video sharing website's owner, Google.

Matt Brittin, UK country director for Google, said Monty Python was an "interesting example" of how copyright holders could benefit from YouTube.

Speaking at the Media Summit 2009 in London today, Brittin said Video ID let copyright holders identify their content on YouTube and then decide what they want done with it. Many rights holders opt for complete removal but the Monty Python team decided to create an official channel on YouTube instead.

The official YouTube video announcing their plans appeals to viewers to buy DVDs in return for the comedians' decision to allow its clips to be shown and not sue anyone for breach of copyright.

Brittin said Google had an official deal with Amazon in the US and with iTunes in the UK, US and a few other regions, providing links to the retailers' sites next to the Monty Python videos on YouTube.

Within days of the launch of the official Monty Python YouTube channel, sales of the DVD box set had gone up by 16,000% on Amazon – admittedly off a low base, Brittin added.

The box set made it to number two in the Amazon charts and was still selling strongly, despite the fact that all the content was originally created prior to 1983, he said.

Brittin cited the creators of the 1980s children's cartoon shows He-Man and She-Ra as another example of a copyright owner using Video ID to take more control of its content on YouTube, rather than remove it.

Earlier in the day at the Media Summit, Channel 4 chairman Luke Johnson singled out Google, along with Yahoo, AOL and MSN, for being "parasitical" organisations that took the vast majority of UK online advertising revenue, without investing back into UK content.

Brittin told the conference that Johnson was a "smart guy" who was currently focused on shoring up funding for Channel 4, but was also probably quite aware that the broadcaster was partnered with Google to help it make money from its website.

In the US, Google is experimenting with using an online auction model to sell excess television inventory. Brittin said it was "early days" but he suspected the UK television market was quite different and it probably wouldn't translate to this side of the Atlantic.