Sony software czar's big challenge

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Stringer, the company's first non-Japanese CEO, launched his current reorganization of Sony last fall with a promise to break down those silo walls, improving coordination between divisions and product groups. That will take a diplomat's graceful touch as well as an engineer's credibility.

By all accounts, Schaaff has both.

In a string of interviews, former colleagues described him as calm and intelligent, with a keen ability to understand social dynamics as well as computer code. He listens deeply, absorbs information and reflects before making a decision, with little desire to seek the limelight himself, they said. Wiltgen called him a calming "anti-Steve Jobs."

"If you look at the want ads for Sony Electronics, you don't get the same kind of pay scale you get at Apple, or the same kinds of rewards."

--Richard Doherty, analyst, Envisioneering

Schaaff started his career at a small Vermont company called New England Digital, well-known in media circles for creating the powerful Synclavier digital music synthesizer. The founders of the company hired him directly out of Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1982 with a degree in mathematics and social sciences.

The Synclavier was then used widely for movie sound effects, and NED worked closely with studios including Lucasfilm. The company's co-founder, Cameron Jones, remembers the young Schaaff as the one staffer able to bridge a cultural gap, seeking to understand how the moviemakers actually worked.

"Tim was able to extract himself from the technological soup that we geeky types were in, and relate to the sound engineering work force in a very human and open way," Jones said in a recent interview with CNET News.com. "He's really in tune with his relationships to other people, which a lot of other technical managers are not."

In the early 1990s, NED was slipping financially downhill. The company had used Apple computers in its own products, and had already sent employees to the Macintosh maker. Schaaff left for Apple in 1991, initially working on speech synthesizers, and ultimately climbing the ranks to head up the company's QuickTime engineering team.

That role brought him early on into close contact with Microsoft, which was developing its own multimedia software in the mid-1990s. In a deposition given in 1998 as part of Microsoft's antitrust trial, Schaaff detailed meetings with Microsoft executives who pressured him to stop developing the QuickTime media player for Windows.

"The conversation was sort of, 'You guys really should reconsider your efforts to establish QuickTime as a standard for playback. We are a very strong competitor, and we usually win in these matters, so you might want to give up now,'" he told attorneys in that 1998 deposition.

His interviews were damning on other fronts, too. He testified that Microsoft executives told him they weren't afraid of antitrust suits because the government moved too slowly to be effective. He said the executives told him it was routine practice for Microsoft employees to delete e-mails that might later be used in court.