WASHINGTON — The new managing director of Microsoft Research China hopes to take the software giant's Asian research arm to the next level as the company seeks to crack the booming Chinese wireless market. At the same time, the laboratory is focusing more of its research on driving international standards for wireless and other key markets, said director Ya-Qin Zhang.
Microsoft will announce next week the formation of a wireless and broadband networking group at its Beijing lab that will help drive its wireless efforts in Asia. "Wireless is a very important area," Ya-Qin said in an interview, as Microsoft seeks to extend its software technology throughout China's sprawling wireless networks.
Ya-Qin, formerly the lab's chief scientist, was promoted to managing director of the Beijing-based Asian research facility last August. He succeeded Kai-Fu Lee, who was named vice president of Microsoft's .NET User Interface efforts.
Another part of Microsoft strategy lies in shaping international wireless standards much as the company did PC standards. The China lab has so far succeeded in adding its wireless video transmission scheme and a multimedia search engine to the MPEG-4 compression standard.
The wireless group will work alongside other Microsoft China research groups focusing on user interface and multimedia technologies. Microsoft is battling IBM Corp. and other industry rivals to gain a foothold in the Asian voice- and handwriting-recognition markets. Early versions of the lab's voice-recognition technology are being shipped with the latest version of Microsoft Office. Ya-Qin said the lab is now focusing on extending the voice-recognition technology beyond Chinese to include other Asian languages, such as Japanese.
That effort illustrates Microsoft's Asian strategy. Even though the company based its research arm in China, the lab is intended to develop the next generation of computer products for the entire Asia-Pacific region, the lab director said.
Along with its Beijing research facility and its central lab at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft maintains labs in San Francisco and Cambridge, England. Lab representatives gathered in Redmond last week for a technology festival. The Beijing lab alone conducted 40 technology demonstrations during the event, Ya-Qin said.
Microsoft Research China currently counts about 100 full-time employees and several hundred more engineering students and visiting researchers. Researchers are focusing on technologies that could become products in Asia over the next five to six years. Along with the wireless push, they are working on new products based on test-to-speech, voice-recognition and multimedia-processing technologies. "We want to make sure our research is relevant," Ya-Qin said.
As the debate rages in the United States over whether the PC will be replaced by information appliances, Microsoft and its PC allies believe China's 40 percent annual growth rate in PC sales will continue at least another five years. "The PC is a stable, growing business in China," Ya-Qin said, adding that the PC market there is becoming more diversified as more consumers and businesses connect their machines to the Internet.
Government agencies and large business enterprises account for most of the high-end PC demand, while consumers are snapping up a range of new sub-$500 PCs that are the rage in a country where the TV market has become saturated.
Basic research
While maintaining a tight focus on product development, Ya-Qin said Microsoft Research China also wants to establish itself as a world-class research laboratory. "It is critical to perform basic research" that may or may not lead to new products, he said. The lab has so far filed for about 70 U.S. patents, and publishes approximately 70 percent of its research results.
Ya-Qin has strong ties to the research community. He is a former editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. The U.S.-trained researcher is also the youngest IEEE fellow in the organization's history.
How the lab handles its intellectual property (IP) will be tested later this year when China is expected to join the World Trade Organization. Membership in the global trade group requires strict adherence to global IP guidelines. Experts said China has sufficient safeguards on the books to protect IP rights but lacks adequate enforcement mechanisms.
Ya-Qin accompanied Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer to a meeting last year with Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Ronghi, the leading government proponent of Chinese membership in the WTO. Zhu told the Microsoft executives he is determined to improve Chinese enforcement of IP rights, long a sore spot in U.S.-China trade relations.
