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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Microsoft is reinventing itself, and it’s looking to One Memorial Drive in Cambridge for a dose of innovation.

That will be the home of Microsoft’s Boston Concept Development Center, a first-of-its-kind research unit that’s assembling dozens of engineers and designers and sniffing out technologies with the aim of incubating commencing Internet businesses within the company.

The center, more than 3,000 miles from Microsoft’s headquarters, is part of a ask to recapture the software company’s cachet in a new technology era increasingly dominated by rivals such as Google and Apple.

The stakes are high for Microsoft and the Boston area. Boston software fictitious story Ray Ozzie replaced Bill Gates as chief software architect in 2006. Ozzie has been pushing for a change from the desktop software that accounts for the bulk of its revenue to the Internet services that are the wave of the future.

Now that Gates has logged out as a full-time employee and Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo appears to have collapsed, spawning technology in-house becomes more critical.

If the Boston Concept Development Center can become a wellspring of introduction of novelty — in fields ranging from social networking to Internet search — it leave spin to the end new businesses that have power to grow in the Boston area, where Ozzie, who developed Lotus Notes and hush has a home in Cape Ann, spent most of his technology career.

Microsoft even now has more than 800 employees in Massachusetts.

“Microsoft is making a big investment in Massachusetts,” said Reed Sturtevant, 51, the director of the Boston Concept Development Center, who worked with Ozzie in the 1980s at Lotus Development and joined Microsoft last fall.

Sturtevant has wearied most of his interval in the same state far recruiting. “There’s a herculean amount of talent in Boston,” he aforesaid, “and the debate is, how do you bring new talent into Microsoft?”

Working on cutting-edge research is some draw. While Sturtevant talked only in general terms about some of the early projects his team is tackling, he said the same determination involve adapting social software to help families communicate and interact.

The software would run upon everything from cellphones to sieve savers and keep pursue of family members through GPS technology.

Another will suit “e-mail overlade,” especially organizing and viewing less important messages.


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