Last week, BloggingStocks writer Eric Buscemi brought us the news that Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) intends to spend $1 billion to expand chip assembly and test operations in the Philippines. Analysts are almost unanimously positive on TI performance and now there's one more bit of positive news. SDA Asia Magazine has reported that Larry Tan has been named President of TI's operations in Asia. In light of Tan's 28 year history with TI, from manufacturing on through marketing, Tan is a perfect fit with the new depth of focus that TI has undertaken in its manufacturing flow.

Earlier this year, Texas Instruments adopted a new manufacturing strategy which more closely aligns the expressed needs of their customers with the R&D of TI's third party suppliers. This gives TI a deeper layer of product development and manufacturing control. This strategic shift should give greater quality assurance capabilities to TI and should also speed the processes of product design and development. Texas Instruments now looks at the R&D efforts of its supplier foundries as the first step in its own manufacturing process.

Texas Instruments forecasts that it will spend about $2.3 billion on research and development in 2007. Areas of primary focus shall include: reduced power consumption, reduced costs for digital mobile hardware, reduced size for SRAM memory requirements and analog chip technology. By working more closely with the R&D departments of its third party suppliers to accomplish projects already in process, Texas Instruments will have greater availability of its own resources to apply to new and upcoming technological developments.

Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) CEO Jeffrey Kindler reportedly may cut several thousand jobs as he overhauls the drugmaker which investors have pilloried for failing to have a robust enough pipeline.

Kindler, a lawyer who has never sat on a corporate board, wants to keep research and development spending flat while slashing other spending in areas such as marketing and manufacturing, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), which first reported the plans.

"Despite his relative inexperience in the corner office, Mr. Kindler has won high marks from the board for his boldness, speed of action and frequent communication with directors, says someone familiar with the situation," the Journal says. "He has come across as likeable and accessible with Wall Street, and has pacified critics of the company's transparency by putting its drug pipeline online."

Kindler is expected to offer details of his plans on Monday. Pfizer shares nosedived last month after the company ended the development for a drug that was expected to replace its blockbuster Lipitor, which is responsible for one-quarter of its annual revenue and almost half of its net income. Lipitor faces competition from generic drugs as soon as 2010.

Pfizer and rival Merck & Co. (NYSE:MRK) may be looking to buy biotech firms to add new experimental drugs as the patents for their existing patents expire, according to Bloomberg News.

In the midst of all the bad Microsoft news and yesterday's four-year low, it's worth asking the somewhat theoretical question: what premium does Microsoft's laudable and long-term commitment to basic research add to the long-term value of the stock? 

There's little question that MSFT has created a research establishment that's much in the mold of the early Bell Labs and Xerox PARC (more in a moment as to whether that's a good or bad thing): lots of pure academics hired from top universities who apparently have quite a bit of freedom to select research topics and to publish.  Here's a quote from a recent speech by Rick Rashid, the well-respected Microsoft head of research: "...we started investing in basic research at Microsoft 14 years ago...today we’ve grown to over 700 researchers worldwide. And to put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of growing a major computer science department, like a Berkeley computer science faculty, a year every year for 14 years. And we’re expecting to double that rate of growth over the next two years. We believe that investing in basic research in Computer Science is critically important at this juncture."

But is it critically important to the value of the company?