• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager
• BL Club
• Smartbuy

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth
• Events 2007

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• The Hindu ePaper
• Business Line
• Business Line ePaper
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

P.V. SIVAKUMAR

Ed Fries, Founder of FigurePrints.

K. Bharat Kumar

This software writer developed his first ever game while still in high school because, as he puts it, “Well, I didn’t know what else to do.”

From thereon to selling software games he wrote to help pay for his college education, to leadership positions in the Excel and Word development groups at Microsoft, to leading the Games business at the software behemoth and eventually resigning after nearly two decades there to run his own business, is what an Indian engineering student would call a dream career!

Meet Ed Fries, who was in Hyderabad last week at Nasscom’s conference on Animation and Gaming.

Delivering the keynote address, Fries said, “Gaming is where technology and art converge.”

Emphasising the rising importance of art for gaming he said, “Earlier, you used to have five programmers and one artist. The ratio slowly changed and now, for every five developers you’d have 50 artists.”

Telling him that his work touches our lives daily is enough to have anecdotes flowing from him, as he spoke to eWorld. Ask him how a misspelt ‘teh’ could turn itself to ‘the’ in Word, and he says, “Speaking of these things makes me go back to those days and think of who did what!”

He says he and his group were working vigorously on features for the Excel application when his boss Chris Peters wrote a simple algorithm for the sum total of a column or row of figures (remember the sigma in the toolbox?). The group was sniggering, in jest, at such mundane stuff especially since all of them were working so hard on more complicated algorithms. But when the application was released, the sigma got some tremendous positive feedback.

Fries talks about his own contribution to Excel — the Recalc algorithm. He says, “It was tough to figure out initially. So, I kept throwing this question to all candidates appearing for interviews. One person wrote a wrong algorithm, but that triggered an idea for me. The way to do this was the exact opposite of what he wrote and I had got it.” So, did they hire the candidate? Fries smiles, stares into space and says, “Come to think of it, we didn’t!”

But what made Fries tread up the management path, despite being a developer at heart? “Much of what I did was inspired by my boss Peters’ inspiration,” he says. Peters sort of laid a roadmap for Fries.

But after nine years as founding developer in both Excel and Word, Fries wanted to do something that touched his heart. As he is quoted in media in Seattle, Washington, where he lives, he had for too long given people something serious and wanted to help them relax a bit. So, in 1995, he set up what would eventually become Microsoft Games Studios. “Senior people in the company counselled me and told me that I was making a mistake.” ‘Why would you leave something that was cruising so well as Excel and Word,’ they would ask him. “But I was a maverick,” he says.

How easy was the transition from developing products that were specific and had a well-defined target audience? After all, both a 20-year-old and his father would use Excel and Word in much the same way. That was not so with games.

While he admits modestly that he is not a game designer but just worked with them during the course of his work, Fries says, “It is important to be a gamer if you want to develop games.”

He narrates an incident where his experience at playing software games helped in his software development work. “I was heading a project and we were at the stage where the design was ready. I sat the team down and told them that there was something missing and I didn’t know what that was. But I could tell that if we released the game in that form, it would be an all-right game but would not do anything great.”

A little later, one of the developers had a brainwave. Instead of having the game in a horizontal format, they developed it vertically. So, there was a monkey that would have to climb different levels. In games parlance, it engaged in vertical combat. It had things thrown at it from above. It shot those down. It could get hurt by the debris or by the actual missiles it could not hit. “The game, Dark Void, made for great entertainment. We were lucky that the developer had thought of it.”

Interestingly, he left Microsoft in 2004 for the same reason: for being a maverick. “The Gaming business there had grown too big for me to run the way I wanted to run it.”

On a personal level, the easygoing, friendly demeanour juxtaposes oddly with the perceived aggression of all achievers in Microsoft.

A mention of this elicits an amused smile from Fries. Yes, they are like that, he says of the management with Microsoft. “They challenge you and keep probing you and asking you detailed questions. If you have a view and can defend it, you earn their respect. The quickest way to lose that is to agree with every view of theirs. But it did help that I had a calm outlook.”

In addition to being consultant, advisor and board member in a range of games publishing companies, he now runs FigurePrints, a company that brings video characters to life, in the form of 3D models that end-users can order online.

More Stories on : Software | Entertainment & Leisure | People

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line