Office Labs plays a role as an enabler for product teams to explore new ideas, for people with ideas throughout the company to get traction with those ideas, and to make the innovation we all do more visible. Office Labs also works on incubations for new product or technology areas, and works with technical and business leaders to articulate a company vision for the future of productivity, or “getting stuff done”. Several projects from Office Labs have appeared in Office 2010 and more are to come.
Before Chris started Office Labs he worked in Office for 12 years, best known for starting the product effort that became OneNote. He also worked on Word for more than 10 years, initially on Asian language versions, later on core formatting features, globalization and XML support and finally managing the design team for 5 years. At various times Chris worked on Excel and Publisher as well.
Before he joined Microsoft in 1994 he lived in Japan for several years working for Seiko-Epson Corp on their first Stylus color inkjet printer and had a great time learning Japanese language and culture. He is originally from Montréal, Canada and has a Systems Design Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo.