Set to take software to a higher plane: Key Microsoft engineer, professor launch firm
Charles Simonyi, a Hungary-born programming genius and one of Microsoft's most revered engineers, has resigned to start a company in Bellevue he believes could revolutionize the way software is developed.
Called Intentional Software, the company intends to develop tools to enable programmers to more directly express their intentions in software code.
The tools will be based in part on research into software design and engineering by Simonyi, 54, and company co-founder Gregor Kiczales, 42, a University of British Columbia professor.
Because of his close relationship with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his stature at the company, Simonyi was given permission to use some of Microsoft's intellectual property at the new company. He is funding the venture with his fortune, which Forbes magazine last week said was around $1 billion, making him the 209th-richest person in the world.
Simonyi and Kiczales believe software engineering is at the brink of a major evolutionary step, one that needs new tools to keep pace with the staggering complexity of programming and to overcome the limitations of rigid programming languages.
Their solution is to develop tools for writing code that better represent the design goals of the programmer. Simonyi said a more design-oriented approach will influence not only PCs, but the technology industry at large, telecommunications, health care, transportation and defense.
"The software has to get more sophisticated, more intuitive, better communicate between the systems so this is where we come in," he said.
Kiczales, who is taking a leave from the university and moving to the Eastside, said, "Both of us are passionately committed to changing the world of programmers with this kind of technology."
Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 after helping develop technologies that shaped the personal computer at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center.
Among his innovations was technology behind Word, Microsoft's now ubiquitous word-processing program. But recently his work focused on ways to improve the programming process.
Earlier this year he and Gates discussed the software tools he envisioned and decided they would be best developed outside the company. Microsoft's strategy is to sell high volumes of relatively low-priced products, and the tools Simonyi envisions would initially be expensive and aimed at a small market of developers, enterprises and government.
The new company was founded Aug. 8, the day Simonyi left Microsoft, and was publicly announced yesterday. It's based at the City Center Bellevue building on 108th Avenue Northeast, where it will have 10 employees. It also employs 10 programmers in Budapest.
Simonyi left Microsoft with an unusual agreement. In exchange for allowing Intentional Software to share intellectual property, Microsoft will have privileged access. It may license technologies developed in the new company's early years, and will be given the first chance to negotiate for its technology in the future.
One reason for the special treatment may be Simonyi's close bond with Gates, who hired Simonyi away from Xerox. The two are also neighbors in Medina.
"I'm very excited about the work that Charles is pursuing and very pleased that we will continue to have an ongoing relationship," Gates said in a statement.
It will take perhaps two years for Intentional Software to get its first products to the market, and perhaps four years before they are widely used, said Kiczales. But he expects the technology will prove to be revolutionary.
"Programmers are starting to ask for this, it's in the air," he said.
Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.