N.E.R.D. is a great resource!
If you’ve attended any of the 230 tech- and innovation-related events hosted at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center (N.E.R.D) in the last year, you know that Microsoft has an incredible event space in Cambridge they’re making available. In that time, some 23,000 people have attended events at N.E.R.D. Although some of those events have charged attendees entrance fees, Microsoft hasn’t charged anyone for the use of their facilities.
Why is Microsoft donating their space to the tech and innovation community?
I sat down with Microsoft community relations manager Gus Weber, 28, last week to find out. While I was there, Weber showed me around Microsoft’s office and revealed a little bit about what they’re doing behind the scenes.
N.E.R.D.'s community guy, Gus Weber
I asked Weber directly about what Microsoft has to gain by being such a prominent part of the community.
He made it clear that it’s Microsoft’s view that “a rising tide lifts all ships.” He wants to make sure Boston’s tech community knows that Microsoft isn’t here to tap resources and send talent back to the company’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters. Rather, Microsoft is developing products right here and contributing to the cultural shift in Boston’s tech sector in a big way.
According to Weber, “This is not the Microsoft you bought Windows XP from five years ago.” Things have changed. If you have a negative opinion of Microsoft as a company, you might want to re-think your viewpoint.
“This is not a Microsoft-centric strategy,” he said, sitting in a large room on N.E.R.D.’s first floor. “It’s not a strategy to make people buy more products. It’s really about Microsoft doing the right thing and investing in the ecosystem. Everybody has an opinion on Microsoft, right? One of the things I always tell people is ‘Don’t hate me until you know me. Your opinions are formed through a whole bunch of interactions, but give me the chance to give you the real perspective.’
“So we’ve been totally transparent, and it’s amazing the value that we’ve gotten out of that. It’s great that people want to engage with us and talk to us. They don’t feel like we’re this unapproachable Redmond monstrosity that just has an outpost in Boston.
Microsoft sees the Boston area as a home. If this is their neighborhood, they want to make sure they’re contributing.
“There’s been this shift [in the tech sector], and it’s a very palpable shift. It’s cool that we’ve been able to contribute to that shift — that we’ve been able to help the ecosystem out,” he says.
Weber hopes that more and more organizations will continue to use the N.E.R.D. facility, and he wants people in the community to know that scheduling an event there is as simple as contacting his team through the N.E.R.D. website and starting a conversation.
Microsoft is here to stay and they want to make sure that they’re doing everything they can to make sure the startup and tech community is as robust as possible.
Microsoft knows that by being a better company, they set themselves up as a brand employees can feel good about working for.
After we talked about the community aspect of Microsoft’s Cambridge business plan, I asked Weber to tell me a little bit about what Microsoft was doing behind the scenes. He explained that Microsoft has three distinct groups of employees working at the office. Here’s how they break down:
Microsoft Research – This group of approximately 25 full-time employees is spearheaded by the husband-and-wife team of Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs. They’re working on finding ways to integrate engineering and other disciplines like biology and economics.
“They’re thinking way out in the future, and they believe that a biologist working in a lab is never going to find the cure for cancer,” says Weber. “They believe it’s going to take a combination of some really smart biologists and really smart engineers. Some of their work will eventually make it’s way into products that we sell, but a lot of their output is in the form of research, publications, and presentations at conferences. They’re trying to help advance the state of the art for the industry.”
Incubation Labs - These groups are working on taking some of the greatest new thinking and applying it to products that Microsoft might want to develop in the near future. One such group is Fuse Labs, operated by Lili Cheng, which works on what Weber calls “the future of social experiences.” They’re doing research to find out how to do things like apply game-style interactivity to new products and how to make semantic technologies improve already-existing products like Bing.
“They’re thinking like two, three, five years out, but they don’t have a solid product. They don’t reply to product groups,” says Weber.
Product Groups – These teams build products and ship them. One of the products being developed and packaged at N.E.R.D. is App-V, Microsoft’s application and virtualization product. Another team at N.E.R.D. is the Technical Computing Group, which builds software to help engineers and scientists leverage the power of high performance computing. Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration group, which builds their WorkSpaces product, will be moving into N.E.R.D. in the next few months.
“They build these products end-to-end. Some companies outsource development talent, but that’s totally not the case at Microsoft. These products are shipped directly to consumers from here,” says Weber.
Microsoft is not only creating a vibrant community of employees at N.E.R.D., all of whom work around each other so they can be inspired by each other’s knowledge and efforts, they’re taking that approach into the tech and innovation community here in Boston. Look for their efforts to continue as Microsoft continues to settle in to Boston.
What do you think of Microsoft N.E.R.D? What kinds of things can they do to improve their community involvement? Who should they be working with to help bolster the creative economy and the innovation culture? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Tags: Edu
