Bill Buxston 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. Bill Buxton is multiplatform the way Leonardo da Vinci was multiplatform. 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...
Comments