FILE – The logo of Microsoft is seen outside its French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris on May 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
The move ends a 17-year run for an effort that started as a small Office Labs experiment in Redmond and grew into maker spaces across 15 regions, from Vancouver and New York to Israel, India and Beijing. GeekWire first reported the news, citing an internal FAQ, and some Garage spaces could be restricted starting today, October 23. Microsoft is shutting down The Garage, the companywide program that gave employees space and tools for side projects and ran its annual Global Hackathon.
The Garage began in 2009 with the slogan “Doers. Its profile grew after Nadella became CEO in 2014. That July, it ran Microsoft’s first companywide hackathon, which drew over 11,000 registrants from 80 countries. Seeing AI, the app that describes objects and text for people who are blind or have low vision, started at a 2015 hackathon. The controller was nearly cut over budget concerns before it shipped, The Verge’s Notepad newsletter noted, and went on to star in Microsoft’s 2019 Super Bowl ad.
The Garage will stop operating as a centralised function, and the impact on each location will vary, according to the FAQ. Neither the FAQ nor Microsoft has said which spaces are affected, including the flagship site in Redmond. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company regularly reviews how it uses its physical spaces and is making changes to some Garage locations. The FAQ says the hackathon team is reimagining the event and will share more later.
The Global Hackathon’s future is also unclear. Microsoft’s public Garage website, which showcased hackathon projects and experimental apps, now redirects to the company homepage. Not Talkers. Rather than collecting ideas and funding the popular ones, it backed employees who were already building things on their own. Several real products came out of it. The Xbox Adaptive Controller grew out of a hackathon project that used Kinect motion tracking. Employee Tuong Do built Mouse Without Borders, which lets one keyboard and mouse control up to four PCs, on evenings and weekends. Arrow Launcher, another Garage app, later became Microsoft Launcher for Android.