InnoTech/SAO:EDGE Event with Guest Speaker Bill Hill, Director of Advanced Reading Technologies, Microsoft

By Ed Carroll, Agilis Solutions

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again!”
-Thomas Payne

500 years from now, historians will look back and call this period a time of (digital) revolution. Those are the views of Bill Hill, director of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft, who spoke at the InnoTech/SAO:EDGE dinner event on April 24, 2007.

According to Hill, even in today’s world – where all data is going digital, printed newspapers are going out of business, and YouTube is seriously challenging Hollywood – “‘reading’ is still our dominant means of communication.” Digitalizing data changes the consumption of information that is bigger than the impact felt from the Gutenberg press – “This is a global revolution.” It is estimated that the average American spends 50% of his/her time in front of a computer reading.

With that kind of usage in mind, Hill says that Microsoft does not consider Internet Explorer simply a ‘browser’; rather, to Microsoft, IE is a ‘reader’ – a connection tool that interconnects everyone to potentially everyone. And like revolutions of the past, this one reflects a lot of chaos, filled with bandits, conmen and charlatans – in essence, a frontier. Also like revolutionary/frontier times, not everything is worked out, and no one has all the answers. For example, a single solution does not exist; Microsoft only does software (and certainly does not have all of the bugs worked out), and hardware is limited to refresh rates of dots per square inch, power consumption, battery life, operating temperature and unit weight.

A lot has been learned in this revolution so far, although there is still a long way to go. Remember the ‘ebook’? Hill labeled this attempt to replace a lightweight paperback book with a cumbersome small screen reader as “a huge success.” This is due to the volumes of learning that occurred from the experiment, such as how people read and interact with their reading device. For example, humans have a 207° field of vision, but once we think something is important, we bring that item into a much narrower center of attention. Once an object (say a book, page or screen) is in our center of attention, we become a high-speed scanner where 11-point font is the optimal reading size and 55-60 characters per line prevents the need for the head to turn.

Hill’s presentation was fast and packed with a lot of fascinating information. To view the complete presentation, please click here.

About the presenter
Bill Hill (director of advanced reading technologies, Microsoft Corporation) created a new group at Microsoft called Advanced Reading Technologies to research and develop innovations that improve the readability of text on computer screens. Reading from the screen has become important enough to the company that Bill Gates has made improving it one of his personal top-5 priorities.

Hill was born in Glasgow, Scotland at the close of the 1940s, in the tenement slums of the city's East End (most of which have since been bulldozed out of existence). The biggest single event in his life was learning to read at the age of 3. “I started reading for several hours a day, and I've never stopped since,” Hill said.

In the early 1980s, Hill became interested in computers which led to a successful freelance career writing about the emerging personal computer technology. Contacts with a leading United Kingdom company led Hill to become one of the five founding employees of Aldus Corporation's European operations in 1986. The company was taken over by Adobe Systems in 1994, at which time Hill was approached by Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., and was offered the job of running the company's typography group.

“I came to Microsoft because I believed it was the one company in the world that was capable of enabling the transition from reading on paper to reading on the screen. I'd read Bill Gates' famous 'Information at Your Fingertips' address at COMDEX in 1990. I still have the original, with passages I marked with a highlighter pen. I keep it pinned to the wall in my office.”

We all know that the paper documents we’ve used for centuries are transitioning to the new digital medium. In the near future, students who currently lug 35-pound backpacks to school will carry every book they need from kindergarten to college in a single device weighing less than two pounds!

About the author
Ed Carroll has been building software products for more than 20 years, with particular expertise in automating economic analyses, decision support and supply-chain management processes. He has provided strategic technology leadership in roles such as the vice president of engineering for Egghead.com, director of technology at Nike and director of software engineering at Boeing. He can be reached at EdCarroll@AgilisSolutions.com.