Half a world away from the calm beauty of Seattle and Puget Sound, there's a lab where software dreams come true. At Microsoft Research Asia, the drive to succeed is as intense as the traffic that roars by the front door in unbridled, chaotic fury. If Microsoft's other facilities around the globe seem idyllic, this one, in Beijing, China, is pure street. Nearby high-rises compete with smokestacks for skyline supremacy. Run-down buildings sit next to bustling consumer electronics markets and the Beijing Satellite Manufacturing Factory, where China conducts its spaceflight research. Microsoft's mantra: work hard to get in the door; work harder to survive; then work even harder because the real work-that of an information technology world leader-is just beginning.

If you find it hard to root for Microsoft, you've never met Harry Shum. The Beijing lab's managing director is hearty, engaging, and surprisingly young-in his 30s. "This is a new kind of manufacturing in China," he says, waiting outside his office with a smile. "Not just shoes, socks, baby strollers. Now, we manufacture MIT students, papers, and software." Shum's longtime colleague Hongjiang Zhang is walking by but stops to concur: "It's another level of Made in China,'" he says. Zhang, who's a little older than Shum and more reserved, heads the lab's Advanced Technology Center, a division launched late last year to accelerate new technologies into Microsoft's product pipeline.