What;s heading on more than at Microsoft Reside Labs, the incubation unit that mashed up Microsoft researchers and MSn team members to support velocity the delivery of Microsoft improvements to marketplace?
Microsoft has quietly killed off one of its touted Reside Labs jobs, Deepfish, as my ZDNet blogging colleague Matthew Miller lately mentioned. And one more with the Microsoft incubator;s assignments — the Volta toolkit — is missing in action.
Deepfish,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, an enhanced mobile browser for Windows Mobile, was discontinued on September 30 (or September 31,
Windows 7 Ultimate Key, as the note about the ending with the service on the Deepfish site erroneously states).
Microsoft;s explanation for Deepfish;s demise (from the Live Labs Web site):
“When Reside Labs began working on Deepfish, we set out to prove our theory that there was an unmet demand for a better mobile browsing experience than what was available at the time we started the project in 2006. It wasn;t our intent to create a full browser for the preview, but rather simply demonstrate that a novel and simple new user experience was the best way to achieve that. The positive reception and incredible demand for the Deepfish technical preview went a prolonged way towards proving that. And now,
Office 2007 Product Key, thanks in part to Deepfish, many better alternatives are emerging.”
I wondered exactly what Microsoft believed has been achieved, user-experience-wise, in mobile browsers since the company launched the tech preview of Deepfish in March 2007. A spokesperson responded together with the following statement via e-mail:
“The Live Labs team has discontinued the Deepfish tech preview because mobile browsing is advancing to the point where mobile devices rival the desktop-which is what we wanted to see. User experience advances such as usable touch and intuitive zooming interfaces weren;t widely available at the time. Deepfish helped drive that innovation, and now the market has caught up to where we thought it needed to go and continues to advance.”
I;m surprised the Reside Labs team didn;t simply move the Deep Fish team members to a product group inside Microsoft,
Office Professional 2007, like it did not too long ago with all the PhotoSynth crew. Live Labs is an incubator whose goal is to push Microsoft-developed jobs further quickly into the commercial channel. The aforementioned spokesperson said Microsoft would “look to implement the key (Deepfish) learnings in future technologies.”
Microsoft;s elimination of the Deepfish mobile browsing effort comes at a time when the company is struggling to deliver a new version of its mobile operating system.
While Microsoft lately showed off Internet Explorer 6 for Windows Mobile, the company pushed back the release of its Windows Mobile 7 product from late 2008/early 2009 to the latter half of 2009, according to partners with whom News.com spoke last month. Windows Mobile 7 is expected to include touch and gesture recognition, based on information about the product that leaked at the start of this year.
Meanwhile, speaking of Reside Labs assignments, Volta — Microsoft;s competitor to the Google Web Toolkit — was removed from the Live Labs site on September 8 and has but to return. There;s a posting on the Live Labs blog that states the following:
“Live Labs; experimental developer toolset,
Office 2007 Download, codename ‘Volta; (previously available at is currently unavailable while we make a few changes. We have removed the download and documentation from our site. Your existing copies of the software will continue to function as before, this only affects new downloads. We assure you, the technology will be available again soon.”
I asked officials whether Volta is being discontinued and they said that was not the case. But they also had no far more to say about why the Volta code was removed or when it will be back online.
Live Labs; list of incubated jobs is currently down to three: Listas, SeaDragon and Entity Extraction.
Windows 7 Ultimate Key Live Labs kills Deepfish; s
purification
Linear Mode
