Redmond, Washington — Microsoft Corp. has decided to pare down its 3-year-old Internet-focused Live Labs — incubator to Seadragon, Photosynth, Deepfish, and Volta – is too expensive for this economy, and splitting the research-and-development brains into different parts of Microsoft’s online efforts.
The Live Labs group was launched with much bravado in early 2006 as a partnership between the software vendor’s MSN and Microsoft Research units under the direction of Gary Flake hired from Yahoo Inc. to lead the effort.
Flake will remain head of the group, which will have roughly half as many people and will now focus more narrowly on search and Web experiences, such as Deep zoom, and other navigational and organizational approaches.
The goal of restructuring move is to increase the likelihood that Microsoft’s investments in research will actually translate into shipping products, company spokeswoman Stacy Drake said yesterday. Moving the Live Labs researchers into product groups will allow them to contribute directly to development projects, Drake said.
Gary Flake
In addition, she acknowledged that “economic conditions do play a role” in the changes. Microsoft said in January that it planned to lay off up to 5,000 workers over the next 18 months because of the recession and a drop-off in profits, although the cuts are expected to be partially offset by the addition of 2,000 to 3,000 new employees in different positions.
Seadragon and Photosynth were perhaps the labs’ biggest achievements. Seadragon provided Deep Zoom technology for graphics in Silverlight 2, which has continued to wow audiences at conferences. Photosynth was a 3-D photo stitching application folded into Microsoft MSN business.
Other projects fared less well: Deepfish, a mobile web browser, was shut down last September while the cloud-programming competitor to Google’s Web Tool Kit Volta disappeared from the Live Labs site after a Community Technology Preview (CTP), although Microsoft denied it had been stopped. It is not clear what happened to projects called Listas or Entity Extraction.
Live Labs will move from a “broad and comprehensive” focus to a more narrowly tailored toward a few subject areas. Live Labs will focus on “Web experiences,” including rich data exploration and information retrieval, discovery, navigation, and organization in Web search and other online scenarios.
Drake did not mentioned how many people have been working in the Live Labs group. The employees who remain there will focus broadly on research related to Web user experiences, including navigation, exploration, information discovery and retrieval, and approaches for organizing data, she said.
Other folks will be transferred to Microsoft’s mobile or online-services units, but the company is not laying off anyone as a result of the shift, according to Drake.
“Several teams have been restructured directly to product teams that are in need of Live Labs’ talents to accelerate existing projects,” Drake said. The effort was announced to Microsoft workers on Monday.
In an e-mail interview, Flake said that the restructuring will allow the group to things at a bigger scale.
“Ww have always done many small things, but in this climate we thought that it made more sense to focus on the bigger ideas and bigger bets,” Flake said. “Over the next year, you will see us launch the most ambitious projects we have ever done.”
When he launched the project, Flake said his goal with Live Labs was to help Microsoft develop software faster.
“Historically, the software industry has been an industry in which it was fine to have months or years in between product cycles,” Flake said. “That is something that has been part of Microsoft’s processes as well.”
The breaking up of the Live Labs team was first reported by PaidContent.org.