Introducing Spindex - the Latest Exploration From Microsoft's Labs
Last fall, with Ray Ozzie's support and sponsorship, we started FUSE Labs, with the mission to work with Microsoft product and research teams to ideate, develop and deliver new social, real-time and media-rich experiences for home and work.
Context & Ripple Effects
Spindex continues a long lab-side habit at Microsoft: the Tafiti Silverlight search experiment in 2007 and the leaked Kumo project in early 2009 both came out of research skunkworks before anything reached mainline products, and search stayed on Microsoft's research agenda through that stretch. What changed this week is organizational: the work now runs through FUSE Labs, founded last fall explicitly under Ray Ozzie's sponsorship to ship social, real-time and media-rich experiences rather than pure research demos.
First-order effects
- FUSE Labs gains its first publicly named artifact, giving Ozzie's group something concrete to shop to Microsoft's product teams instead of internal ideation alone.
Second-order effects
- The syndicated framing matters: The Microsoft Blog called Spindex a FriendFeed knock-off, meaning Microsoft is entering a social-feed aggregation space where dedicated players already define expectations — differentiation, not novelty, becomes the bar.
Third-order effects
- If the Tafiti-to-Kumo-to-Spindex pattern holds, Microsoft's route into social search runs through small lab prototypes that either get absorbed by mainline search or quietly retired — with FUSE Labs now serving as the standing intake valve for that pipeline.
The trend: Corporate labs are becoming Microsoft's recurring proving ground for social and real-time search, with each experiment testing how far social feeds belong inside mainstream search products.