Pamela Edstrom, a communications strategist who shaped the public image of Microsoft and its co-founder, Bill Gates, during the company’s reign as the most powerful technology player in the world, died on Tuesday at her home in Vancouver, Wash. She was 71.
Representatives of the public relations agency she co-founded in Bellevue, Wash., said she had died in her sleep after a four-month struggle with cancer.
When Edstrom joined Microsoft in Seattle in 1982 as its first director of public relations, the company was an obscure maker of software and personal computers were only beginning to climb out of hobbyist culture and into everyday businesses.
She departed less than two years later to join an acquaintance, Melissa Waggener, in forming a public relations agency known for most of its existence as Waggener Edstrom. Microsoft remains the biggest client of the firm, now known as WE Communications, one of the largest independent public relations agencies in the world, with revenue of $102 million last year.
Edstrom continued to exert huge influence on Microsoft, becoming one of Gates’s most trusted outside advisers and helping to promote the company’s mission of putting a PC into every home.
Edstrom was one of a handful of counsellors who helped the PC industry’s early entrepreneurs translate their work from engineering-speak into language the mainstream press and public could understand. Tech company founders, in their hands, were pitched as boy-genius wizards out to change the world. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, had a similar communications adviser in Regis McKenna.