MICROSOFT has had around 60 products/divisions/teams die in recent years. It's a real apocalypse, but one has to step back and take an overview to recall everything which was cancelled and then faded out of memory. Microsoft hardly has new products anymore. Killing Windows Mobile and then (re)naming something new "Windows Phone 7" won't really qualify as a new product as it's more of a substitute.
Over at the “Internet Evolution” blog, Rob Salkowitz talks about that fun little piece of Microsoft Technology ‘Pivot’ that first appeared around a year ago. It’s a neat interactive way to view data that shows a lot of promise, but hasn’t really materialized in any large way. He wonders why, and breaks it down to the fate of Microsoft’s LiveLabs division.LiveLabs was insulated from Office groupthink and politics, but also from the unit’s enormous clout as Microsoft’s cash-cow. Consequently, LiveLabs proved a real-life demonstration of the cartoon where the mad scientist comes out of his lab and says, “Eureka! The experiment is a success! Unfortunately, the subject died.”
I was recently pointed to this Microsoft Silverlight keynote, featuring a demonstration of its Pivot data visualization technology (around 1:19). I do a lot of work with Microsoft, but I have next-to-nothing to do with Silverlight; I could barely tell you what it does. However, I've done lots of work on "future of information work" planning and strategy, particularly around the vexing issue of information overload and data visualization. Pivot represents the most interesting innovation I've seen along these lines, from Microsoft or anyone else for that matter.
Pivot, which was positioned as a reinvention of the Web browser when it debuted in 2009, is now PivotViewer, a Silverlight app that enables end users to instantly build custom visualizations of dynamic datasets. By organizing the data visually, it lets you discover relationships at a glance that would ordinarily take hours of number-crunching. You can also slice, dice, zoom, and scatter the data, even as it's updating from a remote Website or server.