Brass in the middle of Microsoft's cultural shift

So how to explain Dick Brass, who made millions during a decade at the Oracle Corp. and made even more as an early investor in the wireless company Omnipoint?

Three years ago, as others were cashing out of Microsoft, Brass came to work for the software publisher 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.

Tomorrow, Brass' role in the company should become much more publicly visible when he joins Microsoft founder Bill Gates at the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, where Gates plans to give the first detailed demonstration of the tablet computer still under development by almost 100 designers on Brass' team.

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 Brass, a former speech writer for Oracle's colorful and sometimes outrageous chairman, Lawrence Ellison, may be the best evidence that Microsoft is in the midst of a fundamental cultural shift.

Brass' 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.

Certainly, in a relatively short period 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 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 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 Brass' yacht.

The tablet computer is one of the best examples of Microsoft's multibillion dollar effort to reinvent itself for the presumed post-PC era.

"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.

But the pursuit of 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 led to some of the Valley's most celebrated failures -- most memorably in two abortive start-ups, the Dynabook Corp. and the Go Corp., and the debacle of Apple Computer's notorious Newton.

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."

In 1979, while Brass was a features editor for The Daily News of New York, it dawned on him 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.

Although Brass' 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 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 Brass a millionaire many times over.

He has also had his setbacks, though. He moved to Seattle in the mid-1980s 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, Brass was hired in 1989 by the software giant Oracle after persuading Ellison that there was money to be made from broadcasting the content of newspapers to PCs. Because Oracle was soon brought to near-death by accounting missteps and a wrenching revamping of the company, Brass' ideas were put permanently on a back burner.

But Brass stayed on at Oracle for eight years, as senior vice president of corporate affairs, involved in strategy and writing speeches for Ellison -- who is known for having publicly taunted Gates.

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, Brass' move from Ellisonto Gates was a change of allegiance worthy of the novel "Shogun."

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