InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
January 4, 1999
Clarifying ClearType
By Stuart J. Johnston
o sooner had Microsoft CEO Bill Gates demonstrated
ClearType, than naysayers started doubting Microsoft's claims that the technology is a
breakthrough for improving readability of flat-panel color displays.ClearType, which Gates showed off at Comdex/Fall (Redmond Watch, Nov. 23, 1998), is software that greatly enhances the readability of text on computer screens--from notebook PCs to handheld devices. The technology holds much promise for evolving platforms such as electronic books.
Many Microsoft critics are saying there's no way this technology is an innovation, and charge that it was most likely ripped off some other company. After all, their argument goes, everyone knows that Microsoft couldn't innovate if its life depended on it.
There are at least three or four different sets of claimants who say ClearType is based on their own, earlier work, or on the work of others.
For instance, Steve Gibson, president of Gibson Research Corp., the creator of the SpinRite disk utility and an early Mac lightpen developer, says ClearType pretty obviously takes advantage of Apple Computer patents from 1976, as well as other techniques that are in the public domain. That work, by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, made it possible to use a composite video television as a monitor for the Apple II. Steve Gibson's ClearType site is located at: http://grc.com/cleartype.htm. Gibson has also written a small freeware program that he says demonstrates how he thinks ClearType works, which can be downloaded from: ftp://grc.com/fc.exe
However, former IBM researcher Ron Feigenblatt says Gibson is all wet. The Wozniak patents are not about color flat-panel displays at all, he says. But Feigenblatt's own work, which was patented by IBM in 1990, dealt specifically with flat panels and "color misconvergence" as a method of fooling the human eye into thinking the resolution of a screen is better than it actually is. Feigenblatt's ClearType site is located at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Ridge/6664/ClearType.html.
One interesting point about both of these sites is that Gibson and Feigenblatt compliment Microsoft for coming forward with ClearType, despite their criticisms that it must be based on earlier work.
Indeed, Feigenblatt says unequivocally: "If Microsoft has a technique to render text on color mosaic matrix displays [that is, color flat panels] which significantly improves image quality over that achieved with the naive methods now in use, I think they can defend patentable claims. Congratulations to them for a job well done."
And there are other claimants, too, who are claiming to have invented at least the predecessor technologies to ClearType as well.
Compounding the problem of sorting out all of these conflicting claims is that Microsoft has not yet described how ClearType works. That means that everyone making claims against ClearType's originality can only guess at how it works, based on the little that Microsoft has made public about the technology.
Microsoft says its legal team is applying for patents and the researchers themselves are busy writing the technical papers on ClearType that they will submit to computer science journals.
Dick Brass, the VP of technology development at Microsoft Research, whose group is responsible for ClearType, says it will take "weeks, maybe months" before the technical papers can be published and the legal issues cleared. For one thing, technical papers have to go through peer review before publication.
With all the controversy surrounding ClearType, you can be sure that, if the reviewers of those technical papers find that Microsoft did not come up with a breakthrough in font display on flat-panel displays, the world will hear about it in fairly short order.
And if Microsoft Research discovers that they have inadvertently co-opted or built their technology on someone else's earlier patents, they will freely acknowledge that fact, Brass says.
To date, however, he says that Microsoft researchers have not found any patents on which they infringe with ClearType. "This is not a trivial rediscovery of a Wozniak patent," Brass says. Those patents are well-known, Brass points out. Besides, he adds, if the techniques described in those patents were so obviously the way to improve flat panels, why have they languished the past 20 years? Why haven't the flat-panel makers been using them?
Of course, the hair-splitters and those who say everything that Microsoft does is derivative will always find something to carp about--and will find Microsoft guilty even if the peer reviews, the patent office, and even the courts decide the technology is new.
I'm going to withhold final judgment on questions of ClearType's originality until the facts come out. There will be plenty of time for recriminations later, if it turns out otherwise.
Either way, however, with Microsoft behind it, ClearType is bound to have an impact on our lives. While Microsoft won't comment on when exactly the technology will be available, I've heard it will likely be delivered first in Windows CE devices sometime this year. It will later be used in electronic books and in Windows 2000.
As for those who dismiss out of hand the notion that Microsoft could be conducting innovative research in its labs, they should consider that Microsoft Research consists of a group of academic researchers doing "basic" research like the old Bell Labs or Xerox PARC model.
Sure, many people are familiar with chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, the physics wunderkind who's in charge of Microsoft Research. But what about Rick Rashid, the father of the Mach operating system kernel? Mach underlies the NextStep operating system on which the next major release of the Mac OS--known as Mac OS X or "Rhapsody"--is to be based.
What about Jim Gray, the former IBM researcher who co-invented the so-called "two-phase commit?" That brilliant piece of work allows data integrity in serious transaction processing applications. Gray also was the winner of this year's Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award, which many people view as the computer science world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
And there's Gordon Bell, the co-founder of Digital Equipment Corp. and one of the main inventors of the minicomputer. The list goes on and on. There are 300 researchers of that quality quietly laboring away in Microsoft Research's facilities in Redmond, San Francisco, Cambridge, England, and soon in Beijing.
The ClearType controversy aside, critics of Microsoft Research should consider the possibility that some very real innovation is and has been going in Microsoft's labs. The folks there aren't chartered to come up with killer products or to eat the competition's lunch. Their job is to do the kind of basic research that leads to breakthrough technologies, the kind of work for which IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center is known.
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