Microsoft’s Leader in Web Apps: Meet Dr. Flakenstein

By: Chuck Salter Mon Oct 13, 2008 at 5:45 PM

Strange things are going on in the lab of Gary Flake. Can this Web geek make Microsoft come alive?

A Live One: Gary Flake, founder of Live Labs, says Microsoft has a historic opportunity in web apps.| photograph by Amanda Koster

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Photo Magic: Live Labs' Photosynth app, which turns snapshots into 3-D worlds, is just one of flake's new technologies. | courtesy of Photosynth

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"Can I get you a Coke?" Bill Gates asked.

It was 2005, and Gary William Flake, the head of research for Yahoo, was visiting Microsoft. Finally. Senior executives had been calling for a year, trying to coax him to come meet a few people, hear them out. But Flake thought he already had the best job in the industry.

He hadn't agreed to fly from his home in San Jose, California, to Redmond, Washington, and trade up from his usual T-shirt, until he heard that Gates wanted to meet. That was an offer no self-respecting geek could turn down.

Now here was Gates, greeting him outside his office. The world's best-known and wealthiest technologist, taking his drink order.

Why the royal wooing? Flake had been the chief science officer at Overture, where he had helped build the advertising-search technology that became the dominant Internet business model. Google exploited it better than anyone else. Yahoo had wanted it so badly that it acquired Overture.

Now Microsoft wanted to acquire Flake. But it wasn't his only suitor. Days before meeting Gates, he'd had breakfast with Google cofounder Larry Page. "Are you serious about going to Microsoft?" Page asked. Flake said he wasn't.

Then he sat down with Gates, who sipped a Diet Coke and shooed away his handlers when the scheduled hour was up. They talked for 45 more minutes. Flake had intended to pick Gates's brain, but it turned out the Microsoft founder wanted to pick his. About Internet search and online advertising. How Microsoft, the ultra-disciplined and occasionally plodding maker of desktop software, could turn its advanced research into actual products more quickly -- generating the sort of dazzling Web breakthroughs Microsoft isn't known for. How the company needed someone to inject a dose of inventiveness that could transform the Microsoft culture into something more agile and adaptable. "The humility and candidness stunned me," Flake recalls.

After the meeting, he called his wife to share an unexpected realization: "I think I want to work for Microsoft."

Microsoft's desktop applications and platforms still generate the vast majority of the company's $17.7 billion annual profit. Its products run more than 90% of the world's personal computers. That's what the company is built around, what most of its 92,000 employees focus on. So it's not surprising that Microsoft has been slow to pursue other technologies, especially ones that could potentially disrupt its money machine or that lack a clear business model.

The flip side of this focus, of course, is that Microsoft has fallen far behind on some of the biggest tech growth industries. CEO Steve Ballmer has said that Microsoft's future lies in ad sales, not software sales. He's laid out a vision of "software plus services," desktop applications combined with Internet features. Meanwhile, the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple have gotten big head starts, running away with the dominant models in Web search, social networking, and online music distribution. Those companies, not Microsoft, are most often praised as innovators.

To Flake, 41, a techie steeped in experimentation and risk taking who calls himself "Dr. Flakenstein" on his blog, that paradox represents a "historic" opportunity -- not just to bring Microsoft up to speed but to advance radically the Internet experience. He's not interested in making incremental improvements, he says, but rather the kind of great technological leaps that Microsoft is going to need to create visually arresting applications that offer new ways of organizing and displaying information on the Web. In Microsoft's unparalleled reach -- more than a billion computer users worldwide -- Flake sees an unparalleled collective power; the more people contribute data to a site, he says, the richer it becomes for each user. This powerful network effect is as thrilling to him as an elegant mathematical solution. It represents Microsoft's advantage.

Microsoft gave Flake the rare and influential role of technical fellow -- a kind of free-ranging visionary with the clout of a corporate vice president. He was the first outsider to be given that distinction from day one. In January 2006, Flake started Live Labs, a rapid-development Web team that exists outside of any specific product group. As he told Microsoft executives last year, paraphrasing the new team's manifesto, "Despite all of the hype that has been somewhat omnipresent with the Internet over the past couple of years, we are still fundamentally undervaluing the total proposition that it represents to society, and all the various industries that connect to it."