Ex-Rival Helps Microsoft Find Wireless Future
By JOHN MARKOFF
EDMOND, Wash. —
Much has been written
about Microsoft's brain drain and
the continuing string of newly
minted multimillionaires leaving for
early retirement.
So how to explain Dick Brass,
who made millions during a
decade at the Oracle Corporation
and made even more as an early
investor in the wireless company
Omnipoint?
As others were cashing out of
Microsoft, Mr. Brass came to
work for the software publisher
three years ago, in order to pursue
his personal mission of introducing
the world to a new kind of
computer: a fully powered
Windows "tablet," unfettered by
keyboard or cables, that would
always be with its owner, always
turned on and always wirelessly
connected to the Internet.
Mr. Brass is all the more
anomalous in Microsoft's hothouse
hacker's culture, because he is
probably known more for his love
of good food and wine and his
passion for yachting than for his
technical accomplishments. And
yet Mr. Brass, who also has a
well-known flair for hyperbole and
was once the speech writer for
Oracle's colorful and occasionally
outrageous chairman, Lawrence J.
Ellison, may be the best evidence
that Microsoft is in the midst of a
fundamental cultural shift, even as
lawyers appeal the antitrust verdict
that would break up the company.
Mr. Brass's supporters say the 47-
year old former New York Daily
News reporter and editor has the
vision and leadership the company
badly needs as it searches for new
directions, now that Microsoft's
chairman, William H. Gates, has
turned over the day-to-day running
of the company to Steven A.
Ballmer.
Certainly, in a relatively short
period Mr. Brass has made his
mark here as Microsoft's
impresario of electronic books.
But the e-book is just a small part
of a bigger idea — tablet
computing — that Mr. Brass
predicts will extend the personal
computer to the 50 percent of the
population that does not use a PC
today. Just two weeks after he
came to Microsoft to work on
electronic books in 1997, he was
able to convince Mr. Gates of the
importance of his idea after
showing him an ultra-slim wooden
model of the dream machine that had been put together by a cabinet
maker who had worked on Mr. Brass's yacht.
Three years later, Mr. Brass runs four product development teams
comprising almost 400 employees, including those doing research in
handwriting recognition and computer systems for use in automobiles.
On Nov. 12, Mr. Brass's role in the company should become much more
publicly visible when he joins Mr. Gates at the Comdex computer show
in Las Vegas, where Mr. Gates plans to give the first detailed
demonstration of the tablet computer still under development by almost
almost 100 designers on Mr. Brass's team.
The tablet computer is one of the best examples of Microsoft's
multibillion dollar effort to reinvent itself for the presumed post-PC era.
And Mr. Brass, the project's evangelist, has already traveled the globe
spreading the word. In October, he even went to the Vatican for a joint
news conference on the future of electronic books, an effort on which the
company and the Vatican plan to cooperate.
"This is not a crass attempt to get people to buy gizmos they don't need,"
he said in an interview. "I truly believe that a tablet computer will have a
profound impact on the world." Among other impacts, he predicts that
The New York Times will publish its last version on paper in 2018.
In Mr. Brass's view of the new information-centric world, tablet
computing is the Next Big Thing. But it is also a huge gamble. Sought by
many in the computer industry over the last three decades, tablet
computing has already been a Waterloo for some of the best and
brightest minds in Silicon Valley.
Beginning with the Dynabook proposed in 1971 by the Xerox PARC
computer scientist Alan Kay, the idea has died aborning many times and
has led to some of the Valley's most celebrated failures — most
memorably in two abortive start- ups, the Dynabook Corporation and
the Go Corporation, and the debacle of Apple Computer's notorious
Newton.
Mr. Brass acknowledges the peril."We risk the same kind of boomerang
that the Newton received when it debuted and championed its
handwriting recognition and turned into a two-week hilarious run on
Doonesbury," he said.
But there is no turning back, Mr. Brass said, citing plans to put
commercial versions of Windows tablet computers on dealers' shelves in
less than two years.
Microsoft is wagering that the time is finally right for a tablet computer in
the form of an ultra slim slate the approximate size and thickness of a
yellow notepad with an ultra-high resolution screen, an all- day battery
and the ability to recognize handwriting — all with a wireless, high-speed
connection to the Internet.
Of course, not everyone is buying Microsoft's Next Big Vision.
"The problem with this is that it's still Windows," said Paul Saffo, a
computer and publishing industry consultant. "It's like trying to put wings
on a pig; you cannot mutate Windows to give a satisfactory experience in
hand-helds or tablets."
While begging to differ, Mr. Brass says that however long it takes to
reach tablet computing's promised land, it is a journey he has been on for
years. In 1979, while he was a features editor for The Daily News of
New York, it dawned on him while writing at his computer terminal one
day that it might be possible to turn a thesaurus into a computerized
reference.
He did just that and today is still credited as the inventor of the first
electronic thesaurus and first dictionary-based spelling checker software.
The resulting company, Dictronics, which placed various reference works
in a form for use on PC's, was acquired by Wang Laboratories in 1983.
"I'm a one-trick pony," he said. "I've been trying to turn books into
software since 1981."
Born in Brooklyn, and raised in the affluent New York suburb of
Scarsdale, he evinces a streetwise style that has more in common with
New York's garment district (his father, Sanford Brass, was one of the
inventors of Supp-Hose hosiery) than with Silicon Valley's world of
software and hardware engineers.
While Mr. Brass's business timing has usually been good, he has also
been luckier than most. In 1989 he bought a Macintosh computer for his
friend Doug Smith, so that Mr. Smith could produce a proper business
plan for his new venture, Omnipoint, a wireless telephone network that
was eventually acquired by VoiceStream for $2 billion. Because he was
given a 1 percent stake in Omnipoint in exchange for the Macintosh, the
favor made Mr. Brass a millionaire many times over.
He has also had his setbacks, though. He moved to Seattle in the
mid-1980's with a friend, the late technology writer Cary Lu, to start a
company called General Information, which created the first PC- based
phone directories. It was an idea that would blossom a decade later, but
General Information was ahead of its time and the two men were
eventually forced to sell the company without a profit.
Ever intrepid, Mr. Brass was hired in 1989 by the software giant Oracle
after persuading Mr. Ellison that there was money to be made from
broadcasting the content of newspapers to PC's. Because Oracle was
soon brought to near-death by accounting missteps and a wrenching
revamping of the company, Mr. Brass's ideas were put permanently on a
back burner.
But Mr. Brass stayed on at Oracle for eight years, as senior vice
president of corporate affairs, involved in strategy and writing speeches
for Mr. Ellison — who is known for having publicly taunted Mr. Gates.
In one speech at a computer conference with Mr. Gates in the audience,
for example, Mr. Ellison vowed to buy a surplus Russian fighter jet and
fly it over Lake Washington — the setting of Mr. Gates's waterfront
mansion.
Mr. Brass even acknowledges being an accomplice to the group of
Silicon Valley executives that worked behind the scenes to help persuade
the Justice Department to bring its antitrust suit against Microsoft. In this
context, Mr. Brass's move from Mr. Ellison's inner circle at Oracle to
Mr. Gates's at Microsoft was a change of allegiance worthy of the novel
"Shogun."
In that capacity, Mr. Brass has churned the waters in the traditional
paper-based publishing industry. A few months ago, he stood before a
room of executives from the paper- making industry, whose jobs he
predicted would be made obsolete by e- books and tablet computers,
and said, "I see dead men everywhere."
Mr. Brass has converted at least one former critic — his wife, Regina
Dwyer. Ms. Dwyer, a physician, said she, too, had been skeptical about
electronic publishing but had a change of heart earlier this year on a
cross-country flight, during which she read Jack London's "Call of the
Wild," on a Hewlett-Packard Jornada hand-held computer that was
running the Reader software Mr. Brass's team had developed.
"I realized I had forgotten that I was reading on a display," she said.
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