Carol Hymowitz

Carol Hymowitz

5/18/2010 @ 9:56AM

From Sci-Fi To Science: Microsoft's Roz Ho

Roz Ho, corporate vice president for Premium Mobile Experiences at Microsoft , is a computer scientist by training and a 19-year veteran of the same company, whose current job fits her proclivity for creating technology that changes lives.

She recently helped lead the development and launch of the new Kin phone, which allows users to connect on social networks and share music, photos, videos and text messages. Kin was developed in partnership with Verizon Wireless , Vodafone and Sharp.

Early in her career, Ho worked at Bank of America to help produce the world’s first large-scale ATM system. She was a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard for five years, and after joining Microsoft in 1991 she designed and wrote all the feature specifications for PowerPoint, which changed how people present and share ideas.

Ho also worked as general manager of the MacIntosh Business unit, overseeing the development and marketing of Mac Office, including Word and Excel.

Being a woman, however, makes her a minority among other top scientists and executives in the technology industry. In Hong Kong where she was born and spent her early childhood and in San Francisco, where she moved with her family when she was 11, she always got A’s in math. And from the moment she got her first taste of Fortan programming in high school, she knew she wanted to study computer science.

Here, Ho talks to ForbesWoman about why she pursued a career in math and science and what inspires her to keep at it.

“I was born and raised in Hong Kong, at the time when astronauts were first landing on the moon. That’s what first sparked my interest in science. I dreamed about becoming an astronaut. I also always was very good at math, the top student, both at the all-girls’ school I attended in Hong Kong and later at my junior high and high schools in San Francisco.

“But what really led me to computer science was my voracious reading of science fiction. I stumbled onto Isaac Asimov. His Foundation novels (a series of tales set far in the future where humans live throughout the galaxy) captivated me. I read all of them and Asimov’s other novels, too. Then I read everything written by Robert Heinlein and other science fiction authors. These books made me so excited. I kept thinking as I read, “technology can change the world.” And these novels depicted a world where men and women were equal. There were female characters who were scientists, who held political office and who were power figures, even if they weren’t for the most part the main characters. I began equating science and technology with a world that was gender-neutral and that appealed to me.

“It wasn’t lost on me, though, that I was a minority among male students when I took more advanced math and science classes. There were a lot of stereotypical assumptions about my abilities. When I was a college undergraduate at Berkeley and taking calculus, a male student offered to help me with my homework. I was polite but said, ‘no thanks, I’m good at this.’ When the test scores came out, he realized I was the one who was getting the best grades and asked, that’s you, right?’ I said yes’ and thought to myself, ‘I’m sorry to bust your ego.’ The assumption that women can’t do math and science is something I’ve encountered throughout my career. Even today people are surprised about what I do. ‘Aren’t you in marketing?’ they ask.

“From the time I learned how to program, I’ve loved the problem-solving, math-like part of computer science. There’s a lot of detection work involved. I also enjoy pulling together a team of people with different strengths and perspectives and interacting with customers to solve their problems, so instead of just being a technologist I also became a program manager and worked to launch new products. What drove me the most was [the same thing that] inspired me when I read science fiction: how technology can change our lives.

“One of the first business projects I worked on (as a software engineer at Bank of America) was developing the first large-scale ATM system in the world. That certainly transformed society. Now no one has to run to the bank on Fridays and stand on lines waiting for a bank teller to give them cash.

“Later, at Microsoft, I worked on developing PowerPoint. When I started doing this in 1991, people were still doing presentations with transparencies, overhead projectors and slides. But the first time I saw a Dilbert cartoon about Power Point, in 1995, I knew we’d arrived. And today PowerPoint has gone from being a niche product to a product like Kleenex. Everyone has it.

“Eleven years ago, I traveled around the world. I went to remote little towns in Laos and rural areas of China and I’d see people printing out PowerPoint presentations. They were from a template we’d shipped from Microsoft. I’d been thinking about moving to a job in the nonprofit sector, but seeing this made me realize that I love software and I can make a difference around the world creating new technology.

“In the last three years, I’ve worked harder than ever on the launch of Microsoft’s new KIN mobile phone, which is aimed at younger customers who are very active on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. You can publish photos, share videos and connect with all your friends on KIN. We spent a long time doing research about what features KIN should include before designing anything and I had to learn a lot about hardware.

“None of my career has been planned, I mostly just think about what would be fun to do next, what would be engaging and change things.

“The reason I got into the mobile phone space was because it’s clear that phones are becoming the dominant computing platform, and the software in them is a big part of new innovation. Phones are so much cheaper than computers and so much more portable. So I thought to myself, how can I help to improve on what’s happening here?

“I’m still on a quest for creating technology that will enable people to do more things and which makes the world a better place. That’s the promise of technology, and we still have to make it come true.”

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