Beyond Binary

REDMOND, Wash.--It takes a lot to get different parts of Microsoft to really work together. But the current economic turmoil might just be the thing to do it.

At least that's the working theory for Stephen Elop, the former Macromedia CEO who joined Microsoft a year ago to take Jeff Raikes' place running the software maker's business unit, which includes Office.

"It's remarkable how some of those hairiest issues or those longstanding sacred cows, in tough economic times all of a sudden you look at them and say, you know what, we've got to deal with these things," Elop said in an interview this week with CNET News.

Stephen Elop

(Credit: Microsoft)

On Friday, Elop is traveling to Pennsylvania to speak at the Wharton School of Business. He'll be talking plenty about the downturn to be sure. But he'll also be pitching business students and others to prepare for what comes after the downturn. Elop pointed to the way Sears used the Great Depression to shift its business from catalogs to retail stores.

Elop finds himself in the middle of a similar shift as Microsoft finds itself trying to shift from being a business that makes money by selling businesses software every couple of years to one that, in many cases, gets paid to develop software that it will then run in its own data centers on behalf of customers.

As part of his presentation, Elop will also show a concept video that shows a number of technologies, many of which were on display at this week's TechFest, all working together.

In his interview, Elop talked about the economy, what has surprised him in the year since he joined Microsoft, and about the company's vision for the future. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Q: As far as the video, it's really easy to imagine that looking several years out, the hardware gets there. It's fairly easy to imagine that the software that powers it. What struck me is the most ambitious part of the plan is that five, six, seven years from now, all the parts of Microsoft are going to be talking to each other that well.
Elop: So, what I would say to that is I can understand where that skepticism comes from, having come into this company, but I think what you could place more value on is the impact of touch economic times, and the impact that that has on any company.

When I was at Macromedia, we made our most difficult decisions, our most focused decisions around alignment, the big bets during the worst times. And, of course, in the years that followed it turned out we made some good bets, and the company was taken to levels that it had never before seen.

And it's remarkable how some of those hairiest issues or those longstanding sacred cows, in tough economic times all of a sudden you look at them and say, you know what, we've got to deal with these things. An example of that that popped out into the public domain as we went through some of the changes here in January was Office Live, Windows Live. And fundamentally when you look at it from a customer perspective, and what does a consumer expect of Microsoft in terms of an experience, fundamentally they don't want to see divisional lines, they want to see a well integrated, well considered experience that meets their needs.

So, apply a few constraints, like there's fewer resources tomorrow than there were yesterday, stir in like what's really like in terms of how we place our bets, and...all of a sudden it starts to make sense, and you can make those decisions, where maybe some number of months or years earlier you couldn't.

I am personally a big believer and advocate for taking advantage of tough times to go after those things that quite frankly there just wasn't the reason to or the stomach or the constraint necessary.

I'd refer you to President Obama's speech (this week).One of the things that resonated in his speech for me was him saying, you know what, when you boil it all down, we have to solve the health care problem, we have to solve the Iraq problem, like we don't have a choice anymore. I mean, well, maybe before we could have printed more money and somehow we got -- we can't do that anymore. We're having to do that to rescue the economy and make up for the over-indulgence of all of us over the last 25 years. That's what we have to unwind.

So, in that environment fundamentally if we're not going to pass on this huge burden to the future, now is the time we can make those hard decisions.

And my hope is in the political context that the politicians can actually get to that space where they say, you know what, Republican, Democrat, whatever, we've got to solve this, we just fundamentally have to solve it.

Q: So, which is easier, getting Democrats and Republicans to work together in Washington or getting different units in Microsoft to work together?
Elop: It's absolutely easier to get people at Microsoft working together than it is solving the problems in Washington. And the reason for that is because politicians necessarily in a democratic society have to differentiate from one another, have to prove that they're somehow better or different than the other in order to be viewed as successful and get re-elected and get their paycheck.

Q: If that's the case, if that's really what's going on, why has it been historically so tough for the company to bring to market visions that cross these broad product lines?
Elop: You know, increase the pressure, increase the constraints, take away largely unlimited resources, and all of a sudden you're in a position where you say, you know what, how are we going to get the most bang for the buck.

And that's what Steve (Ballmer) has us focused on, you know, what are the bets. A lot of the focus, for example, in the strategy review work that we did within our division was on areas where you know quite frankly I want to spend more money, I absolutely have to spend more money, but that means necessarily I have to spend less money in other areas, and placing those fewer, bigger bets, making those decisions. I think you'll see more and more of that.

Q: So, the bad economy, the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft?
Elop: While the theory of your statement is true, regrettably the thing we can't erase this from or erase from the whole process is the fact that, for example, on January 22, 1,400 people lost their jobs. So, I'll never say, "oh, this is the best thing that ever happened," because there are people in my community whose kids have come into my kids' school and said, my parents lost their job or whatever. So, from a personal perspective, that's not true.

But anything that increases the likelihood of groups working together and that spirit of collaboration coming together is a positive force, so it does help.

Q: In your area what are some of the things that you are saying, you know what, we can't invest as much in?
Elop: I'll give you a couple examples. We said, for example, when we look at our business intelligence strategy, we have a great opportunity to democratize business intelligence, to take advantage of people's knowledge of Excel, to take advantage of the strength of SharePoint. However, having a vertical play in the planning space, monitoring and analytics is good, but in the planning space that goes directly at Business Objects, Cognos and so forth, is an area where ultimately we could be successful but relative to those other bets we need to scale back on.

We also made decisions as it relates to ERP (enterprise resource planning) where we made very clear what our strategy was some months earlier in terms of how we were investing in products, but we had to take a hard look and say, you know what, there are some areas where we've got to manage our investment here...and so pulled back on certain areas.

In unified communications it was an increase in certain areas, but there were some peripheral elements and things we were working on. We said, you know what (we have to go after) voice, Cisco.

Q: One of the things that came out of Steve Ballmer's comments to analysts this week is he said that Office 14 is coming next year. Some people said, oh, they're pushing it out because of the economy. Is that the case?
Elop: It's not at all related to the economy or anything like that. It's the natural rhythm of how we're executing on that release. So, there was no, "Hey, delay the release because of the economy." Not at all.

Q: You came in certainly vowing to look both at what's really working well at the company and what isn't. What are some of the things that surprised you in both directions?
Elop: On the things that have continued to impress me, this is a great week to answer that question, because you can't help but walk through TechFest and see the degree of innovation here, pure and applied research both, coming into the company, seeing how that translates into product development. I mean, walk around that room as you did, meet the people, and just realize the raw intelligence and capability, all of that raw horsepower that exists at this company is remarkable.

It's also remarkable the absolute scope and breadth of this company. That sometimes leads to the confusion you talk about. It might be months into a program where you didn't even realize something was going on five divisions over and three buildings across; I mean, you just don't know. But the surface area of the company offers so many interesting opportunities.

For example, some of the research you saw or other things that are going on where, for example, some of what informed the video and some of our future productivity and how people will interact with technology for productivity reasons is derived from learning from the game space and what people are thinking about for the future of Xbox and things like that. They're a long ways apart but in many ways it's about human interaction, and all of a sudden you get the benefit of that. If we were just an e-mail company or a word processor company, we would never get the benefit of that insight. So, all of that really brings it home.

I think on the so what's challenging and so forth, I think what you referenced earlier, with that breadth of the company, could we be making tougher decisions sooner? That's why going into this period of constraint and everything, I'm definitely a champion of alignment. Hey, we can't keep doing A, B, and C, let's pick one, let's go, let's get aligned, let's get the teams working together.

I mean, there's obviously some major battles and struggles and all of that that you see in the company, the competition with Google in the search marketplace, there's a lot of examples of that, and yet server market, 10 years ago, I would never have thought about Microsoft as providing mission critical server products, but look at that business now, it's a beautiful thing.

Q:How does Microsoft adjust to the fact that a lot of these new businesses are funded in different ways than Microsoft's traditional software businesses?
Elop: I think--I mean, it depends business to business. I think the most important thing is to go in with your eyes open about what you're doing. You're right, you know, there are very few businesses on the planet like the Windows business or the Office business or even the server business for that matter. Yet at the same time there are new business models emerging that could be stronger or more interesting, and you just have to go in with your eyes open.

What you can't do is you can't say because those business models are different we won't do them. You have to fully embrace new opportunities and lead in that space. If you don't, and someone gets in ahead of you and it turns out to be something new and interesting and exciting, all of a sudden they could be miles ahead of you. I can think of one example here in particular where someone saw something that we didn't see, I guess, and away they went, that being Google.

So, you have to go in with some intelligence about it, some foresight, and you've got to be willing to learn, and you've got to be willing to fail fast, and you discover, hey, we thought this whole thing was interesting, turns out it's a dog, back off and try something different.

I think the company, certainly in my experience now over the last year, is very willing to experiment with and adapt to new and changing business models. The whole concept of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, for example, in my division, clearly the economics are different. There's a larger revenue opportunity because instead of just getting a certain amount of software revenue, we get software and services revenue for providing that service, but we have to deal with the whole issue of, hey, but we're running a datacenter, and there's (a cost of goods) and gross margins are different and what have you.

But at the end of the day, if we said we're just going to stick with our original business model, well, someone else is going to do that. So, you have to embrace it and you have to be the very best at it, ultimately being interested in ensuring your customers are taking advantage of as much Microsoft stuff as you can possibly help them do.

Q: Why does it matter to have Office in the browser? We've heard for so long from Microsoft about why the best experience for productivity apps probably isn't in the browser. Why is it important to have them?

Elop: Let me tell you where I think the best productivity experience is. The best productivity experience will be one that successfully integrates in a beautiful and elegant way the benefits that you can achieve in a rich client environment, whether it's a PC or refrigerator or whatever, but it's where you have local processing and graphical power to give you the richest experience, marries that with what you can do randomly when you're in a browser on someone else's PC as well as the mobile environment.

It's not about rich client is better than the browser or browser is better than the phone. It's also not about, hey, we're going to have a Web application so we can go and compete with Google and see who can add bolding and underling. That is not the point. The point is that that organization that can deliver on that broad scenario most effectively will continue to be successful.

The way we compete with Google is with the all up Office System. And by the way, you don't just stop at the client, you know, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and so forth; it's also about the degree of interoperability with unified communications, with the SharePoint Server, with the CRM Server, all of that. So, now let's talk about competition between that experience for our customers, bolding, underlining, italics in a browser. It's a very different conversation.

So, I will not let you define the competition as our little Web app against their little Web app. That's not the story.

REDMOND. Wash.--First, Microsoft showed off its tabletop Surface computer. Then it showed what that might be like as a sphere. At TechFest on Tuesday, Microsoft actually let the user get inside the sphere.

Microsoft's latest surface computing prototype uses a dome constructed from cardboard that serves as a giant display for all kinds of three-dimensional data. The main demo at TechFest featured the dome acting as a planetarium using data from Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope project. But, researcher Andy Wilson also showed the dome as a good backdrop for other things, such as video conferencing or mapping.

Microsoft's Andy Wilson inside a dome-shaped surface computer shown Tuesday at Microsoft's TechFest. In the background is an image from Building 99 on Microsoft's campus.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET Networks)

Since it operates in the dark, the new surface computer relies largely on speech commands and hand gestures for navigation. Although it is probably a good choice in general, it made for some laughs when the speech recognition proved less than perfect.

"Earth," Wilson said, prompting the computer to bring up a perfectly stunning image--of Mars.

Overall, though, the experience was quite impressive, with Wilson taking me through a rapid fire tour from Venus to the Crab Nebula before showing a 360-degree video image of the TechFest show floor. (I shot a couple of videos that I am working to upload now and will embed in the story once I have done so).

Beyond researchers, though, there is the question of who is going to have the space for their own dome. Although the cardboard dome wasn't that expensive to build, not everyone is going to want to carve out a separate dome room in their house. With a somewhat brighter projector, the same effect could be done in a fairly dark room, Wilson said.

Developed by Microsoft Research, Viveri is designed to be a sandbox where Microsoft can try out new search ideas.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET Networks)

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft has a lot of ideas on how Web searching could be better. The problem is figuring out which ideas are the good ones.

In an effort to help sort that out, Microsoft has created a second search site, aimed at testing out new ideas. Known as Viveri, the site is being made available this week to all Microsoft employees, and the company hopes to make it publicly available soon.

Viveri uses Microsoft's core search technology, but then acts as a sort of sandbox where researchers can try out new ideas. In its initial incarnation, the site differs in several ways from the main Live Search. Best viewed on a large monitor, Viveri brings up a standard result screen, as well as smaller separate windows to the right with things such as image search results, a tag cloud of related searches as well as results from other, vertical search engines such as WebMD or Amazon.

"Viveri is like a showroom for concept cars," said Microsoft researcher Scott Imig. Not all of the ideas will make it to the final product, but some will, often in a slightly different form. The goal, he said, is to encourage risk--something that is a key goal of Microsoft's overall research effort.

Part of the idea behind Viveri, Imig said, is to recognize that one answer doesn't fit all search queries.

"Rather than being a department store, this is a mall," he said, noting that Microsoft points people to results from specialty search sites and also offers tools aimed at further refining search terms. In addition to the tag cloud option for related searches, Microsoft also highlights terms in search results that could themselves make for new queries.

Imig said Viveri would be made public "in the fairly near future." There is already a teaser site in place.

Microsoft is clearly still searching for answers in this market. The company has been in the business for years. Its market share has bounced up and down, but remained in the single digits and well behind Yahoo, not to mention Google.

In an interview Tuesday, Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid took issue with the notion that too much of Microsoft's search innovation has not made it into Microsoft's product.

"There has been huge improvement in our search technology," Rashid said, noting that improvements in product search and other areas came right from research. Microsoft's research effort, he said, has helped Microsoft's product teams keep pace with Google even though its business is much smaller.

"They look at Microsoft research as a tremendous advantage," Rashid said.

In addition to Viveri, Microsoft also showed off several other search-related projects at this year's TechFest including Geolife 2.0, which Microsoft bills as "a GPS-data-driven social network that runs on Microsoft Virtual Earth" as well as a new interface for image search and what Microsoft says is a better way of collecting and storing opinion data to help would-be buyers.

Photos: Tinkering around at TechFest 2009

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft already has several tools that stitch together a bunch of smaller photos to create a larger representation. With Photosynth, Microsoft even uses a collection of still images to re-create a three-dimensional experience.

Photos: Tinkering around at TechFest 2009

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Now a team of researchers is trying to do the same thing with video, in real time. The idea is that, at any given event, there are lots of people with cell phones capable of recording video. But the resolution of any one of those videos is pretty limited.

At the company's annual TechFest internal science fair on Tuesday, Microsoft showed how, in real time, multiple cell phone video streams can be stitched together to create one higher resolution video. The idea was developed by a trio of folks in Microsoft's Cairo, Egypt, labs as a way to provide video of class lectures. Pretty quickly, though, the team realized that the technique had much broader uses, everything from citizen journalism to live streaming a family wedding to distant well-wishers.

"There are lots of people that have mobile phones in their pockets," said Ayman Kaheel, a development manager at Microsoft's innovation center in Cairo and one of three people involved in that project. (I've embedded a video below of Kaheel talking about the project and giving a quick demo.)

A few steps over, Darren Edge was showing a project called Notes Scape that aims to create virtual sticky notes that travel with you wherever you go, appearing on any cell phone or laptop that you have nearby. I was a little fuzzy on the technology, but someday Edge said the approach could help visualize and organize information, particularly once we all start walking around with the kinds of heads-up displays that remain largely the stuff of science fiction.

While many projects are aimed at evolving traditional objects into their ultra-high-tech equivalent, the team from Microsoft Research India takes a different tactic. As part of their efforts to bring technology to the rural poor, the group often looks at what might be the lowest level of technology needed to solve a particular problem.

A few years back, the team discovered that a TV and DVD player was a far more effective way of showing improved agricultural methods to rural farmers than trying to use laptops.

This year, the team from India is showing a couple of education projects that try to take advantage of the limited technology that is already pervasive. In one, the group has taken books and digitized them to play on a standard DVD, using the fast-forward button to move from page to page. At TechFest, Microsoft showed a Dr. Seuss book running from a standard DVD, with audio added in the background.

"DVDs are a very cheap medium, much cheaper than textbooks," said Microsoft researcher Sarubh Panjwani.

Thousands of books can fit on a single DVD, said Panjwani. That means a school that can't afford many books can still have a library. It also means that the school can have a means to send books home with students. Even in rural areas, more than 70 percent of people have access to a TV and DVD players are also fairly common.

Plus, a book on TV can be shared by an entire classroom if need be, Panjwani said.

"A TV is big enough to share the content," Panjwani said.

I'll have more from TechFest in a little bit, including details on more research projects, more videos and pictures, as well as an interview with Microsoft Research head Rick Rashid.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

Microsoft Research head Rick Rashid and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie on Tuesday kick off TechFest, Microsoft's internal science fair.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET Networks)

REDMOND, Wash.--Although some companies might see basic research as something to put on the chopping block in tough economic times, Microsoft's top strategy officer argued Tuesday that's the worst place to cut.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, said companies that slash research do so at their own peril.

"A great many companies have a fairly short lifespan," Mundie said, kicking off the company's annual TechFest internal science fair. Even many big, great companies only last 30 years or so, he said.

"The company would struggle I think to survive and certainly to prosper if we didn't have the research investment," Mundie said.

Microsoft Research head Rick Rashid put it more bluntly.

"It's really about an investment in survival," Rashid said.

He noted that in the early days of the software business, when Microsoft had only a few thousand workers, it made a decision to start up its basic research operation. Other companies in the business, he said, made a different choice.

"Most of those competitors aren't with us anymore," Rashid said.

Asked which of the technologies on display this week are likely to help Microsoft move beyond the recession, Mundie pointed to some of the types of new computer interfaces that will help the industry move beyond the mouse and keyboard.

Rashid, meanwhile, said it's hard to know which research bets will pay off.

"You invest in basic research precisely because you don't know what the future is going to hold," he said. "If you knew what you were going to get, it wouldn't be basic research."

Among the several dozen projects on display to the press Tuesday is an effort to build a better thesaurus that CNET News covered last week.

Microsoft employees will have a look and an even broader assortment of technologies on display starting Wednesday.

The goal of TechFest is to expose those in Microsoft's product groups to what is cooking in the labs.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

REDMOND, Wash.--When Dan Morris and Sumit Basu helped create Songsmith, they had no idea that the project would generate the kind of feedback it did.

The program, which automatically generates musical accompaniment for a vocal track, got some immediate and vocal response. Some loved the product, but others criticized Microsoft for trying to be Apple while still others said that the program was devaluing musicians.

"The Internet is a wild beast," Basu said.

But, while they couldn't predict the exact impact, Morris said he expected it would get a lot of attention. "We knew it was awesome," he said. And indeed, it has been used for all kinds of things, including a song that uses as notes the stock market decline.

Songsmith is one of several pieces of software that Microsoft Research has made public in recent months.

As Microsoft prepares for the start of TechFest on Tuesday, the company took time at a reception on Monday to highlight some of the products that have made it out of the internal science fair and into shipping code. In addition to Songsmith, Microsoft was also showing its Worldwide Telescope project as well as its AutoCollage software. The precursor to Songsmith, then known as MySong, was shown at TechFest last year.

Basu gave me a demo of Songsmith, a video of which I posted below. I even gave the software a try myself but I won't post that here because of...copyright reasons. Yeah that's the ticket. More importantly, I want to spare you my singing voice, which once caused a voice coach to consider a new profession.

Anyway, I'll be on hand Tuesday as Microsoft shows off this year's crop of TechFest entries, so check back throughout the day on Tuesday. Hopefully, I won't be doing karaoke.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

A team of researchers at Microsoft is looking to beat Roget at his own game.

Aiming to build a better thesaurus, the Writing Assistance project within Microsoft's research unit is tapping techniques developed to translate from one language to another.

Although thesauri are good at finding lots and lots of synonyms, they require the user to pick the right one because they aren't very good at understanding the context of what is being said. That's where the experience from doing machine translations comes in.

Brockett

(Credit: Microsoft )

"We've taken the actual translation tables...and what we've done is we've taken those and said if a word in Chinese maps to two different English words maybe those two words are synonyms with some probability," said Christopher Brockett, a computational linguist and one of the Microsoft researchers leading the project.

The approach has two key benefits over a static thesaurus. First of all, the newer approach can do phrases, as opposed to single words. Also, it can draw on the context in which the phrase is used.

Brockett plans to show off a prototype of the tool next week at TechFest, Microsoft's annual internal science fair. It's just one of dozens of projects that will be shown as part of an effort to expose Microsoft's business units to the work being done in Microsoft's research labs. (Check back next week for CNET's on-the-ground coverage of the event, which kicks off Monday night at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash.)

TechFest is sort of like "The Dating Game" for Microsoft's research and product development arms. Research teams at Microsoft set up booths, somewhat like a high-school science fair, while product teams shuffle through looking for something that might give their efforts a leg up on the competition.

For the public, TechFest can also offer a glimpse at future product directions. For example, researcher Andy Wilson showed off a number of surface computing projects in the years leading up to the debut of Microsoft's Surface product.

As is the case with most of the projects, the thesaurus effort is still in its infancy.

"We're still working on the algorithms and how much work we give to the language pairs," Brockett said. "We have to get the quality up. There are usability issues that have to be looked into."

Over time, though, Brockett hopes the technique could be used to effectively translate whole sentences. Microsoft has a demonstration of that up on its Web site, but Brockett acknowledges such a treatment shows both the potential and the current limitations of the technology.

But would-be high-school plagiarists beware. Yes, the technology could someday translate the whole Wikipedia article for you, but it would likely translate the article the same way for all your classmates as well. And plagiarism detection software is evolving along with the science of machine translation.

As for the thesaurus itself, the technology would be a natural fit for Word, which already has a built-in traditional thesaurus. But the technology could also help Microsoft in another key area: search.

That's because while search engines are good at finding things like names, that have just one form, they have a harder time finding expressions that can be phrased in multiple ways.

That's less of an issue when searching across the whole Web. For example, searching "Who shot Abraham Lincoln?" "Who killed Abraham Lincoln" and "Who assassinated Abraham Lincoln" all direct you to a page with John Wilkes Booth.

However, when it comes to searching smaller universes, such as a company's intranet, that might not be the case.

"You might not find it if the words are different," Brockett said. In such cases, automatically searching using similar phrases might boost the likelihood of finding a result.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

There was plenty of TechFest coverage last week, but we have a couple more bits to add to the mix.

Up now are several videos from last week, including highlights of a walk-around I did with Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer.

Click here for the Craig Mundie video.

There was a lot last week--from Micropedia, to the much-touted WorldWide Telescope to a new operating system called Singularity. To make it easier to find it all, check out this roundup of all our print and video coverage.

Also worth checking out is a video that colleague Kara Tsuboi did looking at some image-editing software that Microsoft had on display. While most software looks to edit things out of photos, Microsoft Research was showing off a program that adds things back in.

The idea is that these days, we all shoot a lot of pretty landscapes with little action going on. The program from Microsoft lets you throw in some stock images of cars and people and pets. Ideally, of course, you would be able to add-in your own images, but that will have to wait for an updated release.

REDMOND, Wash.--Aiming to build on the metaphor popularized by Wikipedia, a pair of Microsoft researchers have built Micropedia, an internal wiki cataloging every person and project within the company.

Microsoft researcher Steve Ickman said while the company's internal SharePoint site is great for some uses, there are some features that the Wikipedia engine has that are missing in Microsoft's product. One big thing is the engine's ability to archive. On the SharePoint site, typically only the current status of a project is shown.

"Once it's gone, it's gone," Ickman said of the SharePoint site. Micropedia, on the other hand, retains a sense of history, noting a past project and who worked on it, even if it involved people no longer at the company.

"I am a huge fan of wikis," he said. To populate the site, Microsoft Research's Tom Laird-McConnell mined the company's directory, creating a page for each employee as well as a page for each project that someone is or has been working on. The site allows anyone in the company to comment on a person or project and also displays in a separate pane any information found on the public Wikipedia.

Laird-McConnell said that by making the Wiki available company-wide, it would be easier for people in one part of Microsoft to know what those in other parts of the company are doing. Microsoft's current tools are largely organized by teams and are heavily permission-based.

"There's very little cross-collaboration," he said.

The Micropedia approach is similar conceptually to a tool used within Google where any employee can see what any colleague is working on.

For now, fewer than a dozen people, all in research, are using Micropedia, but its creators would like it to see it used throughout the company.

Microsoft has a wiki.

(Credit: Ina Fried / CNET Networks)