In honor of Ada Lovelace, and in preparation for Ada Lovelace Day, March 24, 2009, I sat down one evening with Linda Stone and a pot of ginger tea.

Linda is, in some ways, a modern-day Ada – a geek-grrl with wide-ranging vision and a talent for articulating big ideas. Though, unlike Ada, she neither gambles to excess nor abuses laudanum. (Sorry if you’re disappointed.)

Linda started out in technology as a programmer, became a theoretician and developer of the social interface between humans and computers, and is now a visionary – a term that, however appropriate, still does not encompass her remarkable ability to realize what she envisions – a visionary of the ways that people use technology and technology uses people.

Linda spent seven years at Apple and nine influential years at Microsoft; she was a company vice-president for her last two years there. She is an advisor for the Internet and American Life Project and the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force for the Center for Worklife Policy, and is on the Advisory Board of the RIT Lab for Social Computing. She served for six years on the National Board of theWorld Wildlife Fund and is currently on the WWF National Council.

Most recently, she has been directly addressing the attenuated state of panic that so many of us find ourselves in as we finish up the first decade of the 21st century, noticing and defining such syndromes as “continuous partial attention” and “email apnea.” She has a blog on The Huffington Post.

In Digerati (1999), John Brockman had this to say (and more):

Linda is a people person, one of the nicest in the industry. She’s also very smart. She is a catalyst: she makes friends, stays in touch with key industry people, and attends major industry events to wave the flag. […] No one wants to criticize Microsoft when she is within earshot. No one wants to personally offend this Microsoft executive, who talks openly and affectionately about her years with Apple, and who confides that she used to think of, and nurture, her PowerBook as her child. Linda told me that when she moved to Microsoft she began using a Toshiba laptop. I didn’t have the nerve to ask her what, if any, emotional bonding had taken place.

When I first met Linda, maybe fifteen years ago, she was an Apple personality in a Microsoft environment, a free spirit imagineering virtual worlds from a warren of offices in Redmond. How on earth did she get there? And why?

Let’s let Linda tell her own story.

Linda Stone:

An Interdisciplinary Studies Degree from Evergreen College in Olympia started it all off… and a Masters in Education from the University of Washington. In the first decade after graduating, I taught (special education, second grade), worked as a children’s librarian, and taught university in-service and pre-service teachers.

My passions from a young age: how do people think, how do people learn, what is intelligence, what is creativity and how can we develop these things. What supports communication? I am also a student of people, of human behavior, and am fascinated by how motivation drives us.

I have always been interested in everything, and being a teacher and librarian allowed me to indulge that curiosity. Curiosity and sense of humor are two of my favorite qualities in a person. Working with children for a decade was great fun. Children bring us into the present moment and are open in a way that adults often lose.

In 1980, I was in a crippling car accident: it knocked my right leg out of commission for three years, off and on. I gave up running and cross-country skiing and, in 1980-81, just sat in the computer lab instead.

Eileen Gunn:

Where was this?

Linda:

This was at the UW, in Seattle, where I was in grad school. I was the lightest-weight programmer EVER. My background in everything is driven by curiosity. I discovered that there were computers in the basement at Evergreen — computers with punchcards. I just poked around. I was also, earlier, a weaver and a spinner, when I was attending Evergreen. I helped start the first weaving studio there.

Eileen:

From weaving, to weaving machines, to punchcard-controlled patterns, to computers. It’s the history of computing: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Linda:

Ultimately I was recruited to Apple in 1986.

Eileen:

Who recruited you there? Why did they seek you out?

Linda:

Every year that I taught, I wrote innovative education grants from developing core curricula organized around literature, like Charlotte’s Web or around music, like Peer Gynt, or whatever. A colleague described me as having unorthodox ways of teaching. The thing that matters to me most is demonstrating and enabling passion: this inspires life-long learning. One of the grants I wrote was about Synectics, a company that helped businesses with creative problem-solving and ways of having more effective meetings. At a Synectics workshop in 1985, I ran into people from Apple and other companies. The business folks I met kept after me, and after about six months of this, I finally responded to the Apple folks and went down there to interview, and I was just knocked out — it was an incredibly exciting place.

I worked in IT there and did some innovating with HyperCard as a UI for mainframe apps and as an instructional tool, then moved to multimedia marketing and developed some of the first multimedia CD-ROMS, then moved to evangelism and worked with the publishing community and multimedia developer communities. I loved working with the developer community on emerging technologies and emerging markets. I moved to the consumer products division, and then, in my last year at Apple, I worked for John Scully, doing special projects.

Eileen:

Why did you leave? And why join Microsoft?

Linda:

I was ready for a new adventure, and there were so many career possibilities coming my way. Nathan Myhrvold was the most compelling personality of anyone at any of the dozen companies I was talking to. It was possible to talk with Nathan about anything — from cooking to astronomy to emerging technologies to paleontology. And he’s a totally fun person. I found, in Nathan and later in Rick Rashid, people who could understand and support me, who I loved working for.

I’m excited by technology and also profoundly interested in how it improves the quality of people’s lives.

I took a few months off, then went to Microsoft Research. At first, I did special projects for Nathan, then I co-founded the Virtual Worlds/Social Computing Group, developed virtual chats and virtual worlds, and did many UI experiments. I worked for Steve Ballmer the last two years.

Eileen:

What was it like for you, reporting to Ballmer?

Linda:

Never a dull moment.

Eileen:
[Laughs.] Yeah, it was like that for me too. What were you doing?

Linda:

I did a mix of many things. The primary focus was on improving Microsoft’s relationships and reputation through a variety of efforts.

For example, there were fifteen different groups at Microsoft doing education initiatives. I thought a company message around education made sense, so I would do my best to pull people across the company together to get a dialog like that started. I believed that our way of communicating about who we were needed to take into account what people believed about us versus what we wanted them to believe about us. For example, if we were powerful, how could we communicate what we were doing to use that power to do good?

I brought in interesting speakers when I was in Microsoft Research, and then started the Visiting Speaker Series in 2000, which is still around today. I brought in thought leaders and critics like Eric Raymond, Larry Lessig, and David Farber, to talk and meet with people. I brought in Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, and John Lasseter. These are people who inspire all of us, who open our minds and stimulate our thinking. The series gave employees access to these people and their ideas, and that proved to be a very powerful way of keeping dialog flowing. Many other companies have now instituted their own series, and Kim Ricketts, a bookseller in Seattle who supported my efforts at Microsoft when she was at the University Bookstore, has now created a business around organizing and hosting book signings and author tours in corporations.

While I worked for Ballmer, I managed and significantly improved Microsoft’s relationship with the World Economic Forum. At conferences, in the Valley, in NYC and elsewhere, I was visible and accessible, so that people could talk to me and I would be aware, as much as possible, of problems as they arose and before they became serious. I also helped nurture dialogs on important topics like open source, and followed up on them. I wanted to encourage a general curiosity in the Microsoft community, and to encourage Microsoft employees to develop relationships with the larger community outside of the company.

I was involved in a variety of initiatives, some that I planned and proposed and some that were actually adopted. I hoped to get a best-business-practices course off the ground, as well as a program for teaching employees negotiation skills. I worked on and proposed these, but they were not implemented by the time I left the company.

I worked a lot with newly acquired companies, in an effort to learn from them and support them during culture shock. I worked with the Microsoft employees who worked on the Silicon Valley Campus (SVC). When I started to work with employees on this campus, they didn’t even know each other. They were a mix of small groups isolated from each other, having separate holiday parties, too diffuse to work together on joint issues or technology sharing, and with overall low morale. I worked with a brilliant HR executive at the SVC, Gabrielle Toledano. We had monthly meetings, brought senior Redmond executives through and hosted informal talks with the employees, hosted a product fair so that the groups could get to know each other and each other’s products and technologies, and we worked systematically to address issues unique to that outlying campus.

I also proposed, and hoped to kick off, a D.C. seminar series that would address issues like disaster recovery, security, intellectual property, innovation, and so forth. I believed that an industry leading company like Microsoft had a responsibility to bring together thought leaders and policy makers, in an effort to support well informed dialog on key issues.

Eileen:

Why did you leave Microsoft?

Linda:

Like a lot of people, I work very hard: I’m totally focused, and if I’m in the middle of working on some problem, I get energized. But I love people, and I also enjoy life outside of work, and I felt I had given myself over too fully to work. I wanted to build a more balanced life. I’ve also had aspirations to write.

Eileen:

What’s the real difference between Apple and Microsoft?

Linda:

Apple is about incremental visionaries, and Microsoft is about visionary incrementalists. These are two very different approaches to thinking. At Apple, prototyping and iterating are central to the process — ideas start in the “sandbox.” At Microsoft, functional specifications rule. My research group did a lot of prototyping and iterating before developing the functional specification, and in those days, that sort of thing was more rare.

Microsoft is awesome at execution and shipping, genius at the science of software. Apple is genius at the art of software. At Apple, when we worked on QuickTime, we pulled together a multidisciplinary group of people and then a group of developers. There was a sense of co-creation. At Microsoft, it’s a hand-off process: there is a project manager who controls the process and the check-offs and hand-offs. When a team executes on a feature, they can check it off as complete. At Apple, feature complete is good, but feature cool is also considered — so there is this sense of craftsmanship that becomes part of the soul of the product.

Eileen:

It’s been more than six years since you left Microsoft. What’s coming up for you now? What are you interested in, where are you going? Where do you think the rest of us are going?

Linda:

I continue to be interested in attention — yours, mine and ours. I’m fascinated by social patterns that unfold into trends and have developed my own “unified theory” approach to understanding this.

Marshall McLuan spoke of media as an extension of our central nervous system; media extends what we can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. I’m interested in the effect that this extension has on our central nervous system, and the effect that media has, particularly digital media.

I’m interested in health and technology and health. I coined the phrase “email apnea” to describe a behavior many of us have when we text or work on email. I’m interested in natural ways to soften the impact technology has on our health — interfaces controlled by breath or bio-feedback.

I’m fascinated by the relationship between attention, breathing, and emotion.

I’m curious about how we’ll increasingly think of the body as an electrical system, and we’ll see a shift in healthcare that will embrace both pharmaceutical/chemical interventions, as well as, physics-based interventions.

More randomly — I stay as involved as I can with Dean Kamen’s F.I.R.S.T. non-profit, and with a few environmental and integrative health organizations and efforts. I’m part of the TED conferences brain trust, and I’m involved with the Aspen Institute on the Ideas Festival and the Aspen Health Forum. I love the folks at O’Reilly, and admire what they do, so I plug into things here and there with them. I blog for the Huffington Post and radar.oreilly.com, and have contributed to xconomy.com, forbes.com, and businessweek.com.

I nurture my passions, curiosity and friendships.

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Links

Linda Stone’s thoughts  on Continuous Partial Attention.

A short video:  Linda speaking on the same subject.

For more on what Linda Stone is currently interested in, see her blog on the Huffington Post.

Recent posts:
Fine Dining with Mobile Devices
Blackberry One
What will Change Everything

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Photo of Linda Stone by Joi Ito, 2008. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0