Bill Hill is he staying or going?

Hello Everyone:

This is Bill Hill; I've created a new Channel 9 identity as a non-Microsoftie -because I like Channel 9 enough to want to still hang out there from time to time. It's one of my favorite places in all of Microsoft.

Yes, it's true, I have left the company. I'm sorry for the RRS feed confusion. Here's what always happens: I write a blog entry in the Blogger edit window - which is a horrible place to proof-read. Then when I post it, I always spot at least one typo. So I take the post down to edit it, and then re-publish it. I might end up doing that several times - maybe I'll spot something I feel I could have said better. You can take the man out of editing, but you can't take the editor out of the man...

So RSS catches the first post, alerts everyone who has a feed, but by the time they get there, it's down.

Thanks to all the many Niners, and many others, who've emailed me with good wishes, now and over the years.

Bill Gates told me a few months ago that I had really made a difference in my time at the company, and I hope that's true. When I arrived at Microsoft in 1995, people thought I was mad when I said we needed to improve reading on screen. "No-one will ever read for any length of time on a screen," they said. "They'll print out anything they want to read."

Fourteen years on, now people spend about 80% of their time at the computer reading. I have the satisfaction of knowing I helped make that happen. Commissioning Verdana as "a font for reading long passages of text on the Internet" was my first big project at Microsoft.

A lot has happened since then, but there's still a long way to go. Internet Explorer 8 now has the foundation it needs to become a really great reading application.- since it has integrated the world-class PTLS engine and adopted standards-based rendering by default.

I've left some thoughts behind, of course...

I'm not sure what my plans are yet. I do need to write a book about all this - which started for me, I guess, in 1985 when I became involved with hypertext (pre-Web, of course).

I'll keep everyone informed as much as I can on my blog. I'm also on FaceBook (and LinkedIn, for more business-type contacts).

As I look towards the future, there's a little sadness. Greg Hitchcock on the ClearType team revealed that he's a software engineer with the soul of a poet (for the first time in the 14 years I've known him). He wrote me a mail that ended:

"A tear falling on a dirty mark on a piece of shredded tree leaves a blur. A tear falling on an LCD screen leaves a rainbow". I gasped at the beauty of that.

Thanks for being so great, Niners!