Microsoft tries to get into personal electronics game

REDMOND, Wash. — With Windows-powered mobile devices lagging behind the Palms and BlackBerrys of the world, the Microsoft Corp. has brought an electrical engineer from China — a master of the strategy game Go — to put them back in the race.

He is Ya-Qin Zhang (pronounced yah-CHEEN jong), 39, an experienced computer systems researcher who helped start Microsoft's Beijing research laboratory in 1999. He was tapped in January 2004 to come to Redmond, where Microsoft is based, to lead the turnaround of the Windows Mobile software business, which has hemorrhaged money for years.

Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, first discussed the job with Zhang while he was on a trip to China in 2003 and the two men were in the anteroom of the state guesthouse, waiting for a meeting with the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao. "This is really important to the company," Ballmer said, as Zhang recalls it.

Now the first results of Zhang's efforts are scheduled to be unveiled at a conference May 9-10 in Las Vegas at which Microsoft plans to introduce the next version of its Windows Mobile software, code-named Magneto, with new productivity and multimedia features.

Industry speculation is that Microsoft has been fashioning the software as a "RIM-killer," a reference to Research In Motion, the Canadian company that dominates the corporate hand-held computing market with its BlackBerry.

That claim elicits a polite demurral from Zhang, a one-time math prodigy who entered college in China at 12 and graduated first in his class before coming to the United States to earn his doctorate .

Magneto will test what Zhang said was his attempt to create a new focus on quality software — a break from the Microsoft practice of emphasizing a cascade of new features in each successive product release.

"Now the first thing is quality," he said, adding his second priority is building partnerships for the Windows Mobile business, which has so far failed to replicate Microsoft's impact in the desktop computer world.

To his task he brings the mind of an inveterate player of Go, the ancient Chinese board game, in which he can hold his own against professionals. Far more complex than chess, it is a game that requires patience, the weighing of trade-offs, and the ability to make moves that are startlingly indirect.

He will need all the skills at his disposal if Microsoft is to prevail in the mobile software arena.