Microsoft picks up tune of one-man brass band

DICK BRASS' BELIEF that technology can go one better than the printed page has helped bring about Microsoft's new hand-held devices with type as clear as that on paper.

Dick Brass is the type of guy who deserves his surname. As in brass band, he can be loud and ostentatious. As in brass tacks, he speaks his mind and gets right to the point.

As in brass ring, he likes to go for the big payoff.

All befit his role at Microsoft, which will introduce a longstanding dream of the rotund entrepreneur, raconteur and bon vivant at tomorrow's New York rollout of PocketPC hand-held devices, which feature the new Microsoft Reader with ClearType.

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to movie critic Gene Shalit, Brass, 48, is a familiar figure in technology circles as well as the political arena. A self-described "word guy" who grew up in New York, the Microsoft vice president for technology development has spent the past two years locking horns with book lovers over the merits of replacing the printed page with small glowing screens.

With its new Reader technology, Brass maintains, Microsoft finally has made reading from a screen comparable to reading off a printed page. The difference: ClearType, a means of displaying text more crisply.

"Palm devices are wonderful for data entry and contacts management and the like," Brass said. "But they have displays only an ophthalmologist could love."

The result of a three-year effort, Microsoft Reader is a key component of the Redmond software giant's strategy to make headway in the market for hand-held devices. The PocketPCs that Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Casio will show in New York are sleeker, more compact, more powerful and more versatile than their clunky Windows CE predecessors, which have given little competition to industry-leading Palm and its 70-plus-percent market share.

PocketPCs will offer wireless Internet access and the ability to show videos, play music and take digital photographs, as well as the usual notepad and daybook features. As for Microsoft Reader, it will get a big boost from Barnes & Noble, which plans to promote hundreds and eventually thousands of titles that can be downloaded from the Internet to be read on the PocketPC or other devices.

The advent of ClearType has electronic-book advocates predicting that 2000 is finally the year of the electronic book. Brass, who first broached the subject of an electronic book to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 1981, is uncharacteristically measured in his expectations.

"In the 1980s, this technology was about where the automobile was in the 1880s," he said. "Today I hope we're as far along as the Model T and not still stuck on the Stanley Steamer."

A flair for controversy

Although Brass did not create ClearType, it was his vision and persistence that led Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's chief technology officer now on leave, to set up an electronic-book project.

"Dick built a team of people which is the envy of Microsoft," said Bill Hill, a colorful kilt-wearing Scot who was recruited to the ClearType effort for his expertise in typography. Hill, Greg Hitchcock, Bert Keely, Mike Duggan and others came up with the technology that led to ClearType.

Brass' boss, Bob Muglia, group vice president of the Business Productivity Group, adds: "Dick is both an entrepreneur and a diplomat. He is great at finding opportunities and working with people to make those opportunities happen."

Tell that to Seattle City Council candidates. After Brass helped form a "Safe Streets" political-action committee with a $25,000 contribution to oppose four candidates in last fall's election, he made the "Top Rich Fascists" list of The Stranger.

Although Brass thought the alternative newsweekly went too far in printing his address, he said he was "tickled pink" by the selection. "I can think of no higher badge of honor in this town," he said.

It was hardly Brass' first foray into politics. In 1992, he helped organize Silicon Valley leaders, including his boss at the time, Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison, and Apple Chairman John Sculley, to back the Clinton-Gore ticket.

Those who know Brass, a onetime food critic who remains renowned for a healthy appetite and gourmet-meal budget, were shocked when he decided to join Microsoft, the company he had spent much of the 1990s criticizing when he worked at Oracle. Brass-written speeches by Ellison constantly attacked Microsoft for arrogance and lack of innovation.

"A number of us were aghast that Microsoft would hire one of Ellison's hit men," said a Microsoft executive who requested anonymity. "But Nathan wanted him, and to his credit he buckled down." Still, some at the company view Brass' role primarily as "cheap entertainment - as long as you don't pick up the dinner tab," the executive added.

Brass counters that his group's success with ClearType shows "you don't have to be an ace coder to run a decent development group."

`A brilliant guy'

Ellison calls Brass "a brilliant guy - the only person at Microsoft with a sense of humor." In a similarly backhanded compliment, Ellison views ClearType as "the most innovative thing to come out of Microsoft in the past 10 years."

The move to Microsoft was serendipitous. In 1997, after Brass left Oracle, he was thinking of retiring to the San Juan Islands. But first he wanted to meet with Gates and Myhrvold, partly to apologize "for all the nasty things I'd written into Larry's speeches over the years." The two were "quite gracious," he said. When Brass mentioned that the electronic book was beginning to gain renewed momentum, Gates queried him about heading a Microsoft effort.

Brass jumped at the chance. "I've always felt this was the one company in the world that had the depth of resources, commitment to longer-term projects, quality of people and installed base to allow this kind of sea change to occur," he said.

Myhrvold warned Brass that the project was a "marathon, not a sprint." But it turned out to be more like a "sprint that lasted as long as a marathon," Brass said.

Whether better displays are enough to wean a "society that has been paper-trained," as Brass puts it, is open to question.

"People love books," he said. But when it comes to production, distribution, weight, size and other factors, the computer wins: "We can get 1,000 books on a PocketPC," he says. "Tell that to a typical college student, or anyone who has to haul around a lot of paper, and you can see the light switch on in their heads."

Not a slam dunk

Still, the near-term success of electronic-book devices is hardly a slam dunk. Many units, at $300-plus, are relatively pricey. And digital rights to successful titles are a legal thicket.

"Books are cheap, they're portable, and they don't electrocute you when they fall into the bathtub," said Frank Catalano, a Seattle marketing consultant.

The profit model of electronic books is murky, too. Until millions of units are in people's hands, a publisher cannot expect to sell as many copies as a typical bestseller.

Brass, who after graduating from Cornell University worked as a copy editor at the New York Daily News, first hit on the idea himself two decades ago while working at home on a NorthStar personal computer that cost $15,000 and ran on 240-volt current. "When you booted it up, the lights flickered in the apartment, and the building's elevator slowed down," he recalled.

He noticed the piles of books surrounding his Televideo 910 monitor. "It occurred to me that one day all books would be converted to computers," he said.

Brass subsequently made a fortune from licensing spellcheckers and word reference tools after purchasing electronic rights in perpetuity to works such as the Random House Unabridged Dictionary for a mere $10,000.

Brass passed along his e-book vision to Gates when they first met, but the IBM PC was barely a product and Microsoft had no word-processing software at the time.

Brass eventually turned to Wang, whose word-processing terminals still led the industry. To promote the notion of electronic reference materials for writers, Brass proposed a TV commercial featuring writer Stephen King.

Wang didn't make the commercial, but the idea came full circle earlier this year when a new King novella, "Riding the Bullet," drew more than 400,000 electronic-book downloads in a single day.

In 1985, Brass moved to Seattle so that his wife, internist Regina Dwyer, could pursue medical residency at the University of Washington. With the late Cary Lu, Brass founded General Information, a venture responsible for HotLine, the first PC software to include phone directories.

By 1988, Brass had joined Oracle and persuaded Ellison to set up a Bellevue-based enterprise, Oracle Data Publishing, to pursue news distribution over airwaves using a military-developed technology called spread spectrum. The project came to an abrupt end when Oracle miscalculated earnings and nearly went out of business.

Ellison asked Brass to call on his journalistic skills and polish Oracle's image. Brass became chief press liaison and speechwriter for Ellison and today likes to boast he helped turn Ellison from a corporate mismanager into a "philosopher king."

Brass hopes for a similar reversal of fortune for Microsoft in the electronic-book arena.

"I've had the most fun doing this that I've ever had in a professional capacity," he said. "And it comes pretty close to the top recreationally, too."

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Paul Andrews is a technology correspondent for The Seattle Times. He can be reached by e-mail at paul@paulandrews.com.

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PocketPC rollout

What: Launch of PocketPC hand-held devices

Who: Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, executives from Casio, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and dozens of other companies

When: 9 a.m. tomorrow

Where: New York's Grand Central Terminal

Hype: This is Microsoft's effort to raise the ante on hand-held organizers with an all-purpose unit that not only takes notes and manages contacts but also displays electronic books, plays video and music, takes pictures and, eventually, communicates wirelessly with the Internet.