Microsoft Live Labs Pivot

» see getpivot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed pivot. it lived for about eighteen months as a free download and a ted demo, then went back into microsoft research before anyone i knew tried it. by 2010 i was in graduate-school computer engineering work and pivot was the kind of visualization toy you watched a video about, said "huh, that is interesting", and then never installed.

the product was a windows desktop client that loaded collections of data, where each item was an image plus a few facets of metadata. the engine underneath was seadragon, the deep-zoom technology microsoft had bought from a seattle startup of the same name in 2006. you could pan across thousands of items at once, filter by any facet, and zoom into a single record without losing context of the whole set. it was genuinely interesting to watch. it was also a desktop client in 2010, and the future of data viz was already in the browser.

gary flake demoed pivot at ted 2010 in long beach during the breakthrough session, and microsoft released the public download in conjunction with that talk. eight months later, on 8 october 2010, microsoft announced that live labs would shut down and its remaining sixty-eight staff would move into bing. flake resigned from microsoft the same day. pivot itself kept working for a while, but the team that owned it no longer existed.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

gary flake started microsoft live labs in 2006 as a hybrid between microsoft research and the bing product team. the brief was to ship usable prototypes faster than research, slower than product, in areas like search ux and visualization. pivot was the most public-facing thing the lab made. there were demo collections you could load: covers of sports illustrated by year, wikipedia featured articles, federal budget line items. you would pick a collection, watch it rearrange itself by any metadata column, and see patterns that no flat list view had ever surfaced.

the ted talk did most of the publicity work. for a few months in spring 2010 pivot was the thing technology bloggers showed each other to argue that microsoft had a future in client software. the get-pivot site offered a windows installer and an sdk for building your own collections.

~ the day it died ~

microsoft announced the live labs shutdown on 8 october 2010. the staff went into bing. the pivot client kept running for users who had already installed it, since the collections were just xml-and-deep-zoom-image files served from any web host, but no new builds shipped after the team disbanded. by 2012 the get-pivot installers had been pulled from microsoft's download servers, and the third-party collections people had published quietly went stale.

~ what got buried with it ~

the seadragon zoom code lived on inside bing maps and inside the photosynth product for a few more years. pivot's particular insight, that you could give a person a thousand records at once and let them rearrange the view live, did not become a windows-side norm. tableau took that idea into the browser instead, and the world stopped needing a microsoft desktop client to do it.

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