Moonlighting within Microsoft

If you have a smartphone, you probably have apps on it to check the news, play games, help with shopping or furthermore a hobby like travel or bird watching. Now chances are that you don't but have Bubblegum -- a new app that lets you instantly dress up cell phone photos, tinting them in sepia or adding neon blue highlights, to illustrate, and at the time share the results on Facebook.

App for a nascent market

That's because Bubblegum is an app for a nascent market: people whose smartphones have the new Windows Phone 7 software inside. The phones have been on the market for only a few months in the United States.

But if many people are to choose them in a crowded field led by iPhones and Android-based devices, these new phones will need a large dose of an essential smartphone aphrodisiac: apps by the armload that add games, social connectivity and many other features.

The platform is new

Because the platform is new, developers have to learn its ways previously writing many of those apps. So to add them quickly, Microsoft has taken an unusual step. It has relaxed a strict rule and will let employees moonlight in their spare time and keep the resulting intellectual property and most of the revenue, as long as that second job is writing apps for Windows Phone 7-based devices.

But the rule change at Microsoft is a departure for a company that, like so many others, has traditionally wanted its engineers to give their all to their core jobs, said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor of management and engineering systems at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Innovation. He is as well a co-author of "Microsoft Secrets" and the author of the recent "Staying Power," which has several chapters devoted to the company.

One is Bubblegum. It was written by a recently married couple, Sriram Krishnan, a program manager working on the company's cloud computing platform, and Aarthi Ramamurthy, a program manager on the Xbox team.

Krishnan said that with the app, he wanted to be among the first to capture the Windows phone user base. He hopes the app will give rise to a mini-social network at its site, bubblegum.me, where users will be able to share photos.

He isn't worried that his side projects might raise eyebrows at Microsoft, and he has already written a second app, a Web browser, for the Windows phone.

Microsoft's new rules fit into the broader rethinking of how large companies manage technology, said Josh Lerner, a professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School.

"Microsoft has been knocking their heads against a wall, building more and more bells and whistles for Windows that no one needs," Cusumano said. "Instead, they can use their staff this way. It's a way to make every programmer a potential entrepreneur, and it as well helps Microsoft gain momentum with its new mobile platform."