Microsoft didn’t have its sights set on the robotics industry when the company was founded, but recent developments in the industry made the software giant a natural fit.

Tandy Trower, a Microsoft legend and general manager of the company’s robotics group, gives FOX Business an inside look at how Microsoft got its hands in robotics--and what it aims to achieve in having done so.

TT: We hope what we are doing now (shipping an application development platform and tools and building relationships with the community of hardware and software developers) will provide an important catalyst to what we see as a natural extension and evolution of PC technologies, where our PCs are no longer bound to our desktops, but can move and operate with us in our environment.

The history and impetus for our investment here has been at the direct request of the community. It all started while I was working as part of Bill Gates' strategic staff. After 27 years at Microsoft and having managed a number of its new businesses, Bill had invited me to help be an extra set of eyes and ears on what was happening inside and outside the company. That resulted in my being invited a number of meetings with a wide variety of Microsoft's businesses and also invited to their customer meetings.

While these meetings were on a wide variety of topics, one particular theme caught my attention and that was an open invitation from those in the robotics community to engage with us. It came from educators using robots to motivate students about science and math. It came from universities and researchers doing advanced development. It came from customers in the existing industrial robotics space. They all seemed to saying the same thing:

1) robotics was moving in a new direction that would move robots out of the factories and into the offices and homes

2) there were significant challenges holding back the progress (as noted above)

3) they were inviting Microsoft to participate.

I think this caught my attention not simply because I, like others, found robots to be a cool idea, but because in recent years, new technology communities tended to shun Microsoft, fearing the 800-lb gorilla impact. Yet here was a community actively trying to get our attention and enlist our support by applying our software assets to help.

So I took this idea to Bill Gates. He was quite interested and we had a dialogue at first, but then he asked me to do an in-depth study of the emerging market. Five months later I delivered a 60 page report that summarized my discussion with everyone I could talk to from the educational space to academic research to commercial. I reflected that the market was really not here yet, but there was an opportunity to help it emerge by developing a common ground and good development tools that would better enable the community to come together and build on itself.

Bill liked the idea, but before approving sent me to Craig Mundie, one of Bill's direct reports looking to future opportunities and strategies and now one of the senior execs taking over for Bill. Mundie not only heartily endorsed my proposal and how to get started, but offered some advanced technology he had been incubating. With a modest starting budget to hire a handful of smart motivated developers, nine months later I returned with a prototype of our new toolkit. Gates was so impressed he directed me to take it to the market and make it free for non-commercial users (hobbyists, educators, students, etc.).

That was in 2006. And we are now in the development of our next major release having collected excellent feedback from over 200,000 developers.

But what pleases me even more is that the impact we hoped to have is happening. The seeds are bearing fruit. Universities worldwide are starting to use it. Commercial companies are building products based on it.

My favorite example is Braintech, a Vancouver BC startup, who entered the industry creating vision recognition for ABB, one of the world's largest industrial robot vendors. Braintech ported their vision recognition (technology that 10 years ago might have been considered a black art) which was originally created orient ABB's industrial robot arms to our platform. The result is that they now deliver this kind of technology not only to commercial and researchers, but our platforms make it possible to apply to educational robots. Can you imagine what this means when we take such powerful technology and put in the hands of our children, who need little help to get excited about robots (look at the impact of programs like Dean Kamen's wonder FIRST competition and how it has changed student's lives).

So in summary we hope to provide a catalyst that expands access to robotics technology to wider audience, bringing more creativity and people into this space, and thereby enabling the emerging community to reach its potential.