New “vertical campus” in Boston area gives Microsoft a presence in a bustling tech community. Recruit-rich MIT and Harvard are nearby.
By Steve Birge

Microsoft’s new vertical campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, occupies this building very close to Harvard, MIT, and downtown Boston.

Microsoft is working to dispel the perception by many in the United States that it is a Seattle company.

It has development offices in Silicon Valley, North Dakota, North Carolina, and sales offices elsewhere in the U.S. Its extensive global presence includes development centers in India, Ireland, Israel, and China.

Now, in hopes of stepping even farther away from its Seattle-centric image, Microsoft is substantially expanding its presence in the Boston area. It opened offices there last fall and now is aggressively recruiting for a “vertical campus” in Cambridge, an office that will have many groups on separate floors in one building, as opposed to Redmond’s “horizontal” campus model. The new campus is located across the Charles River from downtown Boston, in the heart of the East Coast’s hottest technology center and down the road from technology powerhouses MIT and Harvard.

The office’s growing population eventually will include people from businesses across Microsoft. The company’s investment in Cambridge comes because the area is a leader in technology and innovation, and because it has an incredibly rich pool of local talent to tap, said Cambridge campus site leader Sara Spalding. To attract that talent, the goal is to make sure that employees have a great work experience today and the opportunity for a long career at Microsoft without having to relocate, she said.

“Many people are surprised to learn that Workforce Planning research shows that there are ten times more qualified candidates in the Northeast than in the Northwest,” she said. “Ray Ozzie is committed to having Microsoft be known in the Boston area as a local development company, so we’re putting the infrastructure in place to make Microsoft in Cambridge attractive to both current employees and local talent alike.”

The Cambridge campus currently is home to several groups, including Microsoft Application Virtualization, the Boston Concept Development Center, and, starting July 1, Microsoft Research’s New England Lab. Many other teams, including Search and Unified Communications, have individuals or small teams in Cambridge, and several other groups are also considering Cambridge for future development efforts.

The Boston Concept Development Center, headed by Director Reed Sturtevant, grows ideas from concept to product. Sturtevant and the Microsoft Research New England Lab leadership, Managing Director Jennifer Chayes and Deputy Managing Director Christian Borgs, are excited by the prospect of a collaborative environment.

“We absolutely have a connection to research,” Sturtevant said. “Our space is being set up as an open environment.” He said having a similar set of creative, forward-thinking people in the same building “is going to add to our energy.”

The New England Lab is unique in that a significant portion of its focus will be on social sciences—such as sociology, psychology, economics—and seeing how that research can incorporate into software.“What we’re hoping to achieve in the lab is for the hard scientists to interact with the social scientists,” Chayes said. “We want to understand how people value things and how they interact with one another. Then, the algorithms people can take some of those insights and try to better align our software approaches with them.”

Those groups—and the Cambridge campus as a whole—should benefit from the innovative local tech business community, as well as top-level talent not drawn to a purely “West Coast” company, Spalding said.

“A vibrant tech community helps us think differently about the way we innovate and develop software,” she said. “Plus, there simply are a lot of smart and talented people here who aren’t at all interested in moving across the country to Redmond. We want to hire the smartest and most capable people in the world, wherever they are, and there’s a real hot spot and density of those people here in Cambridge.”