Live Labs will be a little less live, as Lindsay moves to RIM
Restructuring is a process that a great many companies, both big and small, are going through in recent days. But Microsoft isn't accustomed to being one of those companies that shares its pain with its users -- case in point, the 2006 announcement of Windows Vista's delay, which was announced to the public as being "on track," in an unscheduled "road map update."
The sad fact this morning is that Live Labs, the Microsoft project responsible for one of the most innovative promotions in all of software this year -- the synthesizing of hundreds of simultaneous photographs of Pres. Obama's inauguration -- is being downsized. This morning's announcement from Microsoft was an effort to say it's not painful and it doesn't mean too much and everything's fine, which in and of itself is an indicator that it's not.
"A number of teams from within the lab will be joining product groups around the company," reads this morning's announcement. "For instance, the social streams team will be joining MSN. Some of our engineers will be helping out with the next generation of Windows Mobile. And others are off to Live Search and Microsoft Advertising. The rest of us will continue our work on building new web experiences, as we always have. But moving great people and projects into the product groups has always been part of our process, so today's news is entirely consistent with what we've always done."
Maybe, if you count Research In Motion as a "product group." Don Lindsay, Live Labs' former high-profile director, is now listed on his own LinkedIn page as the Vice President for User Experience at RIM -- a huge win for the BlackBerry maker.
In a January 2008 interview with Long Zheng of I Started Something, Lindsay described the work he was doing with Photosynth as creating the model for product development that could be accomplished incrementally and seamlessly, without the end user having to be too concerned with the stark and surprising nature of changes.
"New technologies can be intimidating," Lindsay told Zheng, "so the challenge with something like Photosynth is figuring out how to best package and deliver it such that the technology effectively 'disappears' and users can simply dive in, be rewarded and not have to concern themselves with what is new or different. If the capabilities the technology enables are conspicuous, are valuable to the user and we don't consciously put roadblocks in their way, then we've been successful."
It was a very non-Microsoft philosophy that Lindsay was building, and he was actually doing a pretty good job of it. He might not have made a very good fit at Google. But in joining RIM, Lindsay could be placing himself in the position of producing a trademark look-and-feel for a handset class that desperately needs it. Reports have inaccurately placed Lindsay at Apple during the time it was developing the iPhone; in fact, Lindsay's tenure at Apple only stretched to 2003. But during that time, he led the team that developed Aqua, the trademark appearance of Mac OS that remains the envy of Microsoft...which may continue for the foreseeable future.
The Live Labs team was also responsible for Seadragon, the well-reviewed experimental system for picture browsing for mobile devices, most ostensibly and surprisingly the Apple iPhone. Those Live Labs engineers joining the Windows Mobile team may not be producing any more iPhone apps. And Matthew Hurst, the fellow behind the intriguing Social Streams aggregator of content from social networks, tells the world this morning, that he's excited to join MSN. He claims to be taking Social Streams with him, though MSN has never been known to be a developmental utopia.