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newsmaker Craig Mundie, chief technical officer of Microsoft's strategic alliance and policy division, has spent a good part of his 14-year career at Microsoft dreaming up cool technology.
Besides working closely with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to develop technical, business and policy strategies for the company on a global scale, Mundie is also hands-on when it comes to thinking up new ideas for Microsoft's non-PC computing business.
In part 2 of a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Mundie talks about the different ways in which Microsoft has innovated beyond the desktop PC and applied its technologies in new exciting ways.
Fourteen years at Microsoft is a long time. How did it all start?
I've only had three jobs [in my life]. In my younger days, I joined Data General, because they acquired a start-up company that I was in when I was still in university. I worked as a programmer and became a senior manager for R&D. In 1982, I left [and together with another man], we decided to start up another company. We ended up designing a supercomputer and built a mini-supercomputer company in the Boston area, and I [ran the business] for about 11 years. In 1992, I joined Microsoft as the general manager of the then non-existent division which focused on software for non-PC products.
| I was the Godfather at Microsoft of all the non-PC computing activities. |
Thirteen years ago, I went to Microsoft to lay the foundations for a world--which Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, (who was the CTO of Microsoft at that time), and I all shared a dream--in which microprocessors and software would find their way into almost everything in our lives. And in 1992, that was a very avant-garde thought. But today, people take that for granted. [For example], you've got a microprocessor in that little tape recorder. All of our phones and cars have dozens of microprocessors, and so there is a huge and growing demand for intelligent systems and software in virtually every aspect of our work, home and entertainment lives.
Describe your involvement in these "avant-garde" projects.
I was the 'Godfather' at Microsoft of all the non-PC computing activities. In my first six years there, I started all of our initial activities in interactive television, I did the first game machine, I did the first smart watch, I did the first automotive product, I started the initial work in cell phones, and so many of the things that society is accepting of today. It was a fun and great experience. [These projects] also show how long the lead time is between when you start doing the basic research and development and when the global society at large is prepared to embrace them in a big way.
This is our 13th year developing advanced interactive television technologies, and it's really the first year that any of it is going into broad-scale, commercial deployment. One of the things that distinguishes Microsoft is not only our willingness to invest in pure research but also to invest in these new categories that have very, very long lead times to commercialization. But today, Microsoft is the only technology company in the world that has a competitive offer in every category from watches to cars, to cell phones, to televisions, to game machines, to personal computers and servers. We have competition in every category, but no other company really invests to be able to try to provide an integrated offering across all of these areas. That is something that I think will show some benefit over time.
What else are you betting on that could change our lives in the next few years?
Perhaps the thing that has been layered on top of that in the last few years is the focus on the opportunity to add a Web-service component to almost every one of our products. In the past, Microsoft was a company that had both platform offerings like Windows and applications like Office, but they were both confined to the personal computer.
What's happened now is we have spent more than a decade providing that same level of platform and solution capability across a much broader array of device categories, as well as in a sort of raw form for people who want to embed this into their own products-- whether it's a CAT (Computerized Axial Tomography) scan in the hospital or a braking system in a vehicle. We have technology to enable a lot of that. We also started more than a decade ago to create MSN. The evolution of that, together with Hotmail, and more recently the Live services for Windows and Office, shows we believe that there is a service-oriented component that can be offered in conjunction with these other software.
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