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Monday, November 16, 2009
Startup Labs, now FUSE, took brunt of Microsoft’s Cambridge cuts
By Galen Moore
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The staff cuts announced last week at Microsoft Corp. took a heavy toll among the company’s former Startup Labs team, not long after the year-old team was reorganized and folded into a new entity called Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab.
With last week’s cuts, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has removed 17 former staffers of its Startup Labs, about a third of FUSE’s Cambridge team, according to two former team members. The cuts hit a team formed just one year ago to take a more entrepreneurial approach to new technologies in the Redmond, Wash. software company’s Cambridge research and development hub. Officials say R&D will continue in Cambridge, but Microsoft is reining in the free-wheeling aspects of its strategy. It’s a change that the company, one of Massachusetts’ largest employers of software developers, has undertaken with several similar ‘labs’ initiatives, calling a halt to open-ended exploration and bringing efforts into alignment with existing product priorities.
Last September, Microsoft planted Startup Labs in an airy space spanning part of two floors in the software giant’s new NERD (New England Research and Development) facility in Kendall Square. The team had an open mandate to spin up new technology and test it in the marketplace — and its successes include the initial development of a Twitter search interface that is now the front end of Microsoft’s Bing Twitter search, company officials said.
Startup Labs director Reed Sturtevant, a former IdeaLab vice president with extensive connections in the New England startup community, left suddenly in October. With Sturtevant’s departure, Microsoft announced that Startup Labs and the much smaller Rich Media Lab, both based in Cambridge, would be folded together with a Washington-based group, MSR Creative Systems, into the new FUSE labs. Redmond-based general manager Lili Cheng, who formerly ran the MSR group, took over as manager of FUSE.
Cheng declined to discuss specific numbers, but said the cuts do not indicate Microsoft is scaling back its commitment to research and development in Cambridge. “I’ve personally been spending a lot of my time here (in Cambridge),” she said, speaking by phone from Microsoft’s Cambridge facility. “Our plan is really to invest in the local region and to really grow the lab over time.”
Other elite Microsoft R&D units have also scaled back, turned their focus inward toward Redmond, or eased off the gas pedal entirely. Like Startup Labs and now FUSE, AdCenter Labs, Live Labs and Office Labs report to Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. All have undergone major changes in the last year.
Live Labs, launched in 2006, announced cutbacks and a reorganization in April, in which its teams were dispersed into other product groups. The group’s latest announcement is the retirement of its Thumbtack web content organization experiment — although founder and director Gary William Flake will be on hand next week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) to talk about a new experiment, “exploring new ways to organize, access and experience large amounts of information on the web,” according to the PDC website.
AdCenter Labs, launched in January 2006 in Redmond and Beijing, appears to have gone completely off the radar. The group’s website has been down for at least two days, and its blog has been dormant since October 2008. Office Labs, launched last April, appears to be publicizing side projects started by engineers throughout the company, but blogs related to its homegrown “concept test” prototypes show no activity since May. A spokeswoman said that Office Labs is still active, but has turned attention to larger projects more oriented toward existing product categories.
The same thing is happening at Cambridge’s NERD. From now on, R&D in the lab groups at the Kendall Square facility will be less free-form and will receive more direction from Redmond, Cheng said. “We really want the team here to be more connected into the larger business goals and focus a lot less on taking projects and spinning them out as individual separate things,” she said.
Overall, Microsoft’s cuts, which hit 800 workers globally, affected about 40 employees out of 1,000 working in the Bay State. Startup liaison Don Dodge was also among those cut. Today, Dodge reported he has been hired as a developer advocate by Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), a position that will move him to the search company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
“I hope Microsoft is not stepping back from the startup community,” Dodge said today, “But with Reed Sturtevant being let go and me being let go, it’s not a good trend.”
Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) president Kiki Mills said that even if R&D efforts do become more inward-facing, she hopes Microsoft will continue to maintain the connections it has fostered in the Massachusetts developer community during the past two years.
“Everyone wants to start a dialogue, but you have to act on that dialogue,” she said. “They’ve worked their butts off ingratiating themselves with the community. They get A-plus, plus three stickers on the paper.”
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