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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Flake reports to Ray Ozzie, a kindred Internet spirit who was hired in early 2005 as chief technical officer. Under Ozzie, Microsoft has launched several innovation labs to create new products for groups such as adCenter and Microsoft Office. Flake's Live Labs is the largest, with 170 researchers, developers, engineers, and designers, about half of whom come from various product groups. It's also the most independent, less bound by the usual rules. "We were the first that could take raw research to a product release, soup to nuts," says Flake.

In less than three years, Live Labs has launched dozens of new technologies (and Flake has filed for more than 100 patents). Some launches take mere weeks, lightning fast for a company with multiyear development cycles; those tend to be new features for existing software. Several stand-alone products have also rolled out, or are about to. Volta is a Web-based service that facilitates complex software programming. Political Streams charts political blog activity with an interface similar to a stock chart; it's part of an eventual blog-analysis product that will identify and track the most-popular Internet memes. And in August, to Google-like buzz, Live Labs released Photosynth, a Web application that offers an entirely new way to view photos online by turning everyday snapshots into 360-degree virtual worlds. (The current version allows you to create a 3-D "synth" using only your own photos; later versions will allow you to crowd-source everyone else's images of the same place.)

The Photosynth launch illustrates Flake's guiding principles of the Web. Thanks to the network effect, ultimately there will be more photos of more places, more ingredients for collaboration, more experiences for people to share. Flake believes that the Internet is becoming a mirror of the physical world. He calls Photosynth "one-and-a-half life," a semi-synthetic world between Second Life and real life.

But Flake thinks his group's most substantial impact will be as a "perpetual startup" that spawns other startups. Since Live Labs isn't tied to a specific product group, it's positioned to reverberate throughout Microsoft, releasing its new technologies and teams to other divisions and, in the process, prodding Microsoft's culture.

"Success," Flake says, "is getting kicked out of Live Labs."

As his nickname suggests, Flake is a bit of a mad scientist, with perpetually tousled hair, a penchant for obscure pop-culture references, and major geek cred: He taught himself how to code at 11, and in his twenties, after penning his PhD dissertation on machine learning, he spent three years writing a computer-science textbook. The Computational Beauty of Nature explores the work of thinkers from Sir Isaac Newton to the fifth-century Greek philosopher Zeno, as well as how neurons process information in the brain and the behavior of ants. When word of Flake's hiring at Microsoft hit the nerd grapevine, it was as if he had betrayed some unwritten compact among hard-core coders. As someone posted on the tech-news site Slashdot, "Fallen to the dark side, young Flake has."

"A younger version of myself might have also looked at the world in those black-and-white terms -- Apple versus Microsoft," Flake says. "But I've been around the block, and I've come to realize that what I thought was good and evil is not. There are many more subtleties, and it's a more interesting world because of that." He sees the challenge of creating new technologies and businesses at Microsoft not as a function of inability or misguidedness, but as a failure of process. As director of Live Labs, he's not only trying to innovate. He's trying to create the best methodology for innovation, which Microsoft's other labs can adopt.

Flake is focused on repairing what he considers a critical shortcoming at the company, the gap between researchers and product engineers. Typically, the former explore technology long term as if they're at a university; the priority is publishing papers. Meanwhile, engineers concentrate on customer needs, reliability, and long development cycles, leaving little time to experiment and little incentive to take chances. Live Labs acts as a bridge between the two, he says. Flake's staffers are, as he poetically puts it, "human Rosetta stones" -- meaning they speak the languages of scientists as well as pragmatists. "By using rapid prototyping, by uniquely bridging research and engineering," says Ozzie, Live Labs "has proven to be a novel and effective method for new idea incubation."

Live Labs' "startup factory" consists of small teams of two or three researchers and engineers who apply for early short-term funding to develop an idea, like a startup seeking seed money. To avoid perpetuating subpar projects (a common flaw in internal incubators), the system is set up so that early funding doesn't guarantee further rounds. Last year, Flake and his senior staff killed a project called Listas, for instance, a list-management application that had been in the works for months. The rejection was considered proof that people were taking chances and that the bar was appropriately high.