Much has been made of the fact that Microsoft is moving about half of its Live Labs applied research staff to other divisions, such as product groups and Microsoft Research. The news, announced within Microsoft a week ago, has been met with criticism from outside observers, who lament the reduction of one of the company’s most innovative groups (some would say its most innovative group). But there is another side to this story.
Live Labs was founded in January 2006 by Microsoft technical fellow Gary Flake, in a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research. Its main goal was to accelerate innovation in Internet technologies like search, data mining, and distributed computing. Live Labs has been best known for developing visual interface technologies like Seadragon, a zooming application for all sorts of visual information, and Photosynth, which lets you create striking 3-D virtual environments from a series of photos.
According to the Live Labs blog, the current restructuring sends various team members to MSN, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Advertising, and Live Search. “Contrary to recent whispers and tweets, we are not shutting down, disbanding, dismantling, or anything of the sort,” the blog said. “In the coming weeks and months we’ll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more.”
Microsoft hasn’t said specifically what will happen to Photosynth and other favorite technologies from Live Labs. But the broader question on many people’s minds is whether the innovativeness of Live Labs will be crushed by plugging staff members into shorter-term product development instead of applied research.
Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer science professor and Microsoft watcher, has a very different take. “I think this re-org is great in terms of the company’s competitiveness and innovation potential,” he says in an e-mail. “The people from Live Labs who were doing research are now
