Bill Stewart, Architect, Visionary
Bill Stewart is a world renowned Software Architect and Visionary, best known as an inventor who expanded the screensaver genre, designed After Dark, and is the vision behind new products to merge media, social networking and user co-creation.

Bill enjoys working with companies to achieve their goals, having developed a skill set that lets him comfortably switch gears between business strategy, software architect, public speaker and engineering guru. He enjoys each of these roles and focusing the team on the essential experience a product aims to deliver. Bill particularly enjoys opportunities to flex his skill as a visionary. See his approach below.

With 25 years of proven experience and an ability to communicate effectively with partners, dev teams and the media, Bill inspires trust and confidence leading teams in multimedia, web browsers, gaming and social networking. His many award winning world class products and high profile work for Microsoft, AOL, and HP shows Bill's commitment to quality.

According to Bill
"I've achieved world class success repeatedly, but great success is built upon learning from thousands of mistakes. I've done a prolific amount of work and made a prolific number of mistakes. I've messed up strategy, design, hiring, engineering, tactics, you name it. Every mistake has made me more sure-footed, agile, and ready to succeed. I like building value, mountains of it actually. The more of my skills that clients and partners tap, the more value I can help them build."   Bill can be reached at bill@dynamickarma.com 

Fun Anecdotes Bill has many interesting stories to share from his experiences in the tech world.   As a student, his home-brew robot built out of discarded dot matrix printers won the most prestigious robotics contest in North America by a landslide. It shook the whole room and scared the bejeezus out of anyone nearby.   He is also Sifu at a Wing Chun Kung Fu academy, teaching Wing Chun for the last 15 years. (yes, really) While working for Atomic Energy on his very first job, he stood by his convictions, risking being fired for refusing to "just follow orders" on a dangerous assignment. He was later proven right, having avoided involvement in one of the worst computer errors of all time.   His first attempt at designing and building commercial software became the #1 selling software package 3 months after initial release. He learned to be an assured public speaker very quickly! One of his product designs was a client/server system that Steve Wozniak called "hands down, the best demo I've ever seen!" Steve's a cool guy to have have lunch with..   He created a computer game in 1992 that still receives enthusiastic fan mail and sales 20 years later. Two decades in, it is by far the oldest game still sold at its original price in its original form. Fun never goes out of style. His first piece of software to be distributed was freeware that ended up being incredibly lucrative, sold all over the world and a keystone in creating a new genre. It was fun to be woke up at 3am by fans calling to pay for something they already had.   He may be the only person to single-handedly win a PC World World Class award for Best Utility. Microsoft got second that year.

My Design Approach There are two ideas that guide my approach to product strategy, creative convergence and inevitable invention. Knowledge that cuts across many disciplines allows me to see connections between seemingly separate things. Sometimes those connections allow me to wire 3 mundane "off the shelf" items together in a way that creates something new that unlocks high business value. However, to see where the highest value exists requires digging deep for the essence of a product or service, what it really means to people. When you understand WHAT people want, HOW that should look and feel starts to be easier to understand. When you understand WHY end-users care about the service overall and to what degree specific features are aligned, you start unlocking maximum value. Inevitable invention is the other big idea I coined to guide my approach. When you truly understand a specific market area and where the highest value exists for stakeholders and end-users, the shape of an ideal solution comes into focus. We've all encountered products that are serviceable and the occasional product that so perfectly fits its niche that nobody would think of approaching it a different way, what I call inevitable invention. When the true value in a market area is clarified, often an artful combination of existing items can hit the mark, but sometimes a truly new element needs to be built to bridge the pieces together. When I work on teams I always ask "what would the perfect way to do this look like?" It throws people who aren't used to aiming for excellence, but it isn't that hard to answer if you ask the question at all. An Example The Magic and After Dark screen savers show how my approach works. There didn't seem to be a market for screen savers in 1989, but my early test marketing and some thought about the direction of graphical interfaces indicated that a visual, fun, personal product with no cost of ownership and plausible usefulness could be the biggest hit possible. Magic and its sequel After Dark screensavers were the result. We did build some clever unique bits, but it was mostly creative reworking of standard technology with the right vision behind it. It's success as the world's #1 selling software with Flying Toasters featured everywhere was no accident. We planned and executed to make the perfect product for its niche, a true inevitable invention. It always starts with vision and commitment.