This story ran in the print edition of The Seattle Times on March 21, 2011. To get to the earlier reader comments for this story, click here. -Sharon Pian Chan
Bill Buxton is multiplatform the way Leonardo da Vinci was multiplatform.
The Microsoft researcher is a technologist, a designer, a musician, an author, outdoorsman and a nationally ranked equestrian.
He has spent decades working on the future of tech, but he paddled the rivers of Saskatchewan last summer in 1,000-year-old technology: a birch-bark canoe sealed with tree sap and bear fat.
At Microsoft, Buxton is a researcher who also has been charged with spreading the "design matters" message to engineers who would rather hack code than clay.
Design matters to Microsoft's bottom line, as Apple leapfrogs the company in market share and market capitalization with the elegant iPhone and iPad.
Microsoft has shown pockets of more sophisticated design with the Windows Phone 7 interface and the Arc Touch mouse, but it has a long way to go. The company remains synonymous with the boxy PC, a cutting-edge device in the '80s that now has the sex appeal of mom jeans.
Hired in 2005 with the assignment to "go make a difference," Buxton is trying to spark a design-naissance inside Microsoft.
He summed up his goal in a meeting with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer a few years ago. "We need to have equal competence, which would be design, experience and technology," Buxton recalls telling Ballmer. "Every project needs to have equal status at the table on each of the three disciplines."
He is up front about the challenge.
"My job is to be frustrated," he said via phone from Revelstoke, B.C., about to disappear for a few days on a backcountry ski trip.
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