LOS ANGELES--When Ray Ozzie penned his Internet Services Disruption memo back in 2005, he had a pretty good idea where the computing world was going. He just didn't know how Microsoft was going to get there.
While many are ready to write off Microsoft as an declining icon of computing's last generation, Ozzie sees Microsoft positioned to leapfrog some of the companies that tend to be thought of as the leaders of the cloud computing world--names like Amazon, Salesforce and Google.
Ray Ozzie on stage at PDC '09.
(Credit: Microsoft)"I will never, ever, utter the words 'mission accomplished' for obvious reasons," Ozzie said in an interview after his speech at the Professional Developers Conference. "But I'm really pleased with where things are."
It's been a tough journey, to be sure. But Ozzie says Microsoft has changed in ways he could not have imagined. In particular, Ozzie points to Windows Azure--Microsoft's operating system in the clouds. Rather than just offer a set of services to move today's computing programs to remote servers, Ozzie says Azure is designed to handle the applications of tomorrow.
"When we began developing Azure, we developed it more or less with a clean sheet of paper saying, 'What will the operating environment look like for the next 30 years?' Ozzie said. "If you look at VMware or (Amazon's) EC2, what it really is--and I mean to be saying this respectfully--but it's more or less a (virtual machine) hosting environment. It's not a transformational computing environment."
In a lengthy interview with CNET, Ozzie also talked about lessons Microsoft learned from the recent Sidekick outage as well as why people are wrong to count Microsoft out of the smartphone race.
Here is an edited transcript:
Question: From your perspective, where would you say Microsoft is in terms of making the kinds of shifts you talked about in 2005? What is different than you thought it might be?
Ozzie: You know, when I wrote the memo, I really didn't have a crisp plan in terms of how we're going to accomplish it. And I will never, ever, utter the words "mission accomplished" for obvious reasons. But I'm really pleased with where things are. I mean, I think we have a lot of software yet to deliver, but out at the end user perspective, the notion of Office being across phone, Web, and PC, kind of re-pivoting the experience around productivity as opposed to the device, I'm really happy about [that].
I thought users would be more ready for it by this point in time than I think people really are. I don't think in our minds yet we've yet found, quote unquote, the desktop for the Web in terms of our own personal stuff. It's kind of still scattered out there on the Web.
I didn't think that the cloud computing thing--the back-end side--would take off as much as it has. There wasn't as much about that in the memo, but at that same time, you'd probably be amused to see some of the PowerPoint decks that I was shopping around internally at the time with these big pictures of hydroelectric dams and all these things saying there's going to be this recentralization that happens at the back end of computing, but I didn't know how it was going to pan out.
You announced that Azure is going into production January 1. Is the code changing significantly between now and then, or is that just when the billing mechanisms kick in?
Ozzie: What happens is--and this is all just really difficult to explain to people--but we've rolled out big, new data centers. The community technology preview is on a certain sets of servers. Some of those people may or may not opt to become production customers. Getting their things migrated from one set of systems to the other, it's just internal logistics. So, no, the code doesn't change a whole lot, it's more operational processes. And we really don't want to start charging people until we at least have one billing cycle of knowing that everything is right.
You mentioned moving people from one set of servers to another and immediately I hear in the back of my head "Sidekick." Obviously, the architecture is totally different. But can you talk about what you took away from that [outage for the Sidekick device in October]? In one sense, it was a totally other part of the business, at the same time, it was sort of this early cloud service, and a pretty spectacular outage.
Ozzie: There are a lot of lessons to be learned. Let me just preface this by saying it's inappropriate for me to go deeply into it not just for legal aspects and things like that, but because they're T-Mobile's customers, not ours. T-Mobile is our customer. But let me just speak at the abstract level.
There are lessons to be learned in terms of how acquisitions are dealt with. I know that's a non-obvious conclusion, but basically when you're building your own services and when you're building services from scratch, you have a certain understanding because of the people who were involved in that or whatever--of how this thing relates to that thing. When you bring in a company, you tend to think of things differently. And so there were some lessons to be learned there. There were lessons that we didn't learn, (areas where) we know better and I'll just say we weren't using best practices in certain areas.
The biggest lesson is something that I shouldn't have had to learn, and I'll tell you why. In Groove, I took, for the time, a very contrarian view of, no, it's got to be all at the edge. Nothing at the center, it's all peer-to-peer distributed. Then we--and I mean including me--have kind of swung the pendulum to appliance-based computing that's Web-centric, where the truth is in the cloud, so to speak.
One of the fascinating things about the Sidekick recovery process was how wonderful it was that data is also on the devices, because when your confidence level drops in one copy of the data and you have another one, it's really handy. So knowing to treat peer computing and centralized computing are both good, they're both very, very good.
You talked about the cloud as being early days. And I'm curious, there are some folks that have been playing in the space for a while, you know, SalesForce and Amazon and even Google to an extent. What do you feel Microsoft is offering in the cloud that competitors aren't?
Ozzie: When we began developing Azure, we developed it more or less with a clean sheet of paper saying, "What will the operating environment look like for the next 30 years?" If the servers like Linux and Windows NT-based systems and Mac OS, if these are all based on things that were built when I was in school, what's the next one going to look like? That's the most significant advantage.
If you look at VMware or [Amazon's] EC2, what it really is--and I mean to be saying this respectfully--but it's more or less a [virtual machine] hosting environment. It's not a transformational computing environment. All programs in the future will be written in a way that there is no single point of failure. There's no one server that can die and take down the service. And unless you write your applications for a programming model that's inherently parallel, you don't get to that point. And so, yes, we support the same kind of mode that the EC2 or VMware will do where you can take a VM and put it up there, but the reality is you don't get the benefit of cloud unless you use this other thing.
You actually had to go back and add that in. One of the things you talked about today was to take a virtual machine and put it up on Azure.
Ozzie: That's a very good observation. Last year, we introduced, I guess I'll say [something that was] a little too far ahead and we had to back into the present. But I'm extremely pleased about [adding the virtual machine ability] because anytime someone starts playing with [Azure] and they start to get a taste for what it's really like, then you really say, oh, I get it. Now I know how to design the software for that next generation.
You talked about "three screens and a cloud" as a pretty consistent refrain for Microsoft. But we're still not hearing as much about some of those screens, particularly on the mobile side. You mentioned in the spring we're going to hear sort of about the next-generation platform?
Ozzie: Yeah.
A lot of people are saying, you know, Microsoft and the phone--it's been way too long, game over. Why is that not the case?
Ozzie: I think it makes for good copy to take an extreme position that someone is dead or alive or this or that. Yes, iPhone has a lot of momentum, unquestionably. But I think the phenomenon we're in right now is the app phone. And if you look at the depth of apps that are on these phones, they're not very deep. It's not like Office or AutoCAD, where there are just thousands of man years that have gone into developing these apps. They're relatively thin apps that are companions to some service.
And I think if you look at anyone who's building an app phone--whether it's Palm, Google with Android, RIM--ultimately, all the apps that people want will be on all the phones. They're relatively straight porting efforts. I think people are imagining some kind of a barrier to entry, at least from an app perspective that I don't believe is there.
The biggest barrier to entry is: is it a phone that people want to use? And is it a phone that carriers want to sell and people have to measure us based on what we produce. But I don't believe that there's an app barrier.
This year, it seems like you guys have made a conscious choice to focus on Azure and not on some of the more finished services that live one or two layers up. Are you still pursuing the sort of Live Mesh and the Live Platform layers?
Ozzie: Absolutely.
Live Mesh, as a specific case in point, after we got to a certain point in the beta, we said, okay, how are we going to get this to scale from instead of a million or two million people to hundreds of millions of people? So the team and the technology was put into Windows Live and so even though I'm not making a product announcement, when you look at the next version of the Live services that are downloaded to your desktop, I think you'll see the contribution that the Mesh technologies and the Live platform had to that.
In terms of high-level services, no, we're still concentrating [on them]. You know, we still have a very big focus on the Web apps. I think you probably won't hear a lot about that at PDC, but you'll hear some more about that as Office comes more into a broader beta.
Between Pinpoint and Windows Marketplace, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Zune Marketplace--you guys have a lot of marketplaces.
Ozzie: It'll be converging down to two, one for consumers and one for IT and developers. Yes, it's a big company, yes, we have many ways to sell, but ultimately, there should be one place for consumers to buy things online, you should have one shopping cart across this and that. That doesn't necessarily mean one [user interface] to the marketplace because when you're in Xbox, you want to see it through Xbox. When you're on a phone, you want to see it through the phone.
On the PC, I'm still not actually convinced what the right thing is. When you're on a PC, do you want to see the marketplace through the Web or through a client? You know, I can kind of see both. I mean, look at the Zune marketplace, people like being able to buy it through a media-oriented marketplace, but if you were buying apps, it's not really clear. But in any case, there's one marketplace back end that is syndicatable into multiple front ends for the consumer and for the enterprise/IT, and what we were talking about today was really the enterprise/IT one.
It struck me that today, a lot of the story about the cloud has been that it's great for load balancing, it's great for sort of having predictable investment in IT, but there hasn't been as much about what are the benefits when your app is running in the cloud. It sounds like the new project code-named Dallas could be an example of one of those things where you can build a type of application that you couldn't build on premise because you're using someone else's data.
Ozzie: It is the right way of thinking about it. What we're basically trying to say is by agreeing to get together in a certain way, by agreeing on certain guardrails on the road that we'll all drive on, there can be benefits. Right now, there are many pieces of public data, there are lots of commercial data providers and each one has a different kind of a licensing mechanism. Some license by developer, some license by customer, some license by individual user. There are just lots of different terms. And a lot of the big benefits in the data that's out there are what happens when you join them, when you bring them together. And I believe that there's going to be a lot of potential in this.
Will we see Microsoft be kind of one of those first and best customers, bringing a lot of its data and making it available ?
Ozzie: I think the biggest set of data that you'll see us take in many directions is maps. It's the most obvious from a consumer's perspective. You can layer upon it quite nicely. You can layer both apps and other forms of data on it quite nicely.
What are some of the things that people have developed on Azure? Are there any areas of types of applications that have particularly surprised you?
Ozzie: I'm not sure if you noticed some weeks ago, Qi Lu was at Web 2.0 and he announced this Twitter on Bing feature? That is on Azure. And it's one of the most fascinating stories in terms of agility.
A number of people from across the company looked at this thing and said, "Wow, if we had the Twitter fire hose, what could we do with it? Let's start experimenting." And this other lab said, "Oh, well I already know what to do, you actually have access to the fire hose? How could we ever get enough machines put together in time?"
And just in a matter of weeks, you know, this app just came together, people came together, and we had this thing live. And the number from the virtual machines that are processing the incoming feeds, it's fairly astounding. Since that time, other experiments involving 2,000 machines here, 3,000 machines there, are just popping up because people haven't conceptualized what would it be like to have that kind of resources at your disposal.
Are these the kinds of data feeds we're going to have in the future? I mean, Twitter, you have this tremendous data feed, but you can't take in everything, at least not over an extended period of time right now.
Ozzie: In late '05, I guess it was, when I wrote that last memo, I had a theme that I was kind of talking about internally about moving to the cloud experiences and the back end. These days, I'm basically asking people the question: What if everything was recorded, everything? You are recording in your pen there. Some phones have the capability now--or maybe they're just prototypes that we've got--but measure barometric pressure, measure temperature.
Obviously, there are accelerometers. If you can measure everything and you have this aggregated data, what can you then do with it? And I think just getting people to experiment with it will bring us to places that we haven't known before. People concentrate so much on the scary aspect of privacy related to advertising base uses of it, but there are other uses.
From a health perspective, there are many things that I could measure about myself that would be of value to me and no one else, but we still aren't building those apps. It's just too hard to gather all these things.
When you kind of look at where you are, what are the gates to getting where you want as fast as possible? Is it still a matter of evangelizing inside the company? How much is it still a challenge that Microsoft is such a big company that is divided into product teams responsible for the here and now? What are the things that are sort of the biggest gates?
Ozzie: I would say the biggest gate is the same gate it's been for several years, but it's trending in distinctly the right direction, which is prioritization. It's just simply there are a lot of opportunities, there are a lot of different directions that we could go. And left unchecked, every time you do something new, it causes more complexity.
One of the positive side effects, if you will, of the economic downturn is the fact that we've all been forced to make the hard choices.
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, speaking Tuesday at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)LOS ANGELES--Microsoft wants you to join it in the cloud.
That's the company's message Tuesday from its Professional Developers Conference here, where Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie gave the opening keynote address.
Ozzie announced plans for the formal launch of Windows Azure, the cloud-based operating system that lets developers write programs that run on servers in Microsoft's data centers. It will be in production for all users starting January 1, though a few customers will enter production now, Ozzie said.
In other news, Microsoft announced a technology preview of a new data service, code-named Dallas, that lets Azure customers access various commercial and public data sets. Early partners include NASA, the Associated Press, and InfoUSA.
Microsoft also announced another of its city-based code names. Sydney is a security mechanism that lets businesses exchange data between their servers and the Azure cloud. Entering testing next year, Sydney should allow a local application to talk to a cloud application. It will help businesses that want to run most of an application in Microsoft's data center, but that want to keep some sensitive parts running on their own servers.
Here's our live coverage of Ozzie's talk:
8:20 a.m. PST: There's a rap song playing with lyrics that involve floppy discs and spreadsheets. It may be a long morning.
8:23 a.m. PST: Please silence all pagers, cell phones and Windows Mobile devices. "They're both off," the reporter next to me quipped of the Windows Mobile phones. I was going to make some joke about the Sidekick, but I think I'll leave it at that.
8:30 a.m. PST: Ozzie takes the stage, noting how Microsoft first laid out its services strategy about four years ago. (That's when Microsoft launched Windows Live and Ozzie sent his services disruption memo).
Ozzie talks about how last year Microsoft announced its actual products for the space, many of which are hitting the market now.
He also notes the potential of Windows 7 to help get consumers to a more modern code base that developers can target.
"Windows 7 has the real potential to sweep through and reinvigorate the currently fragmented installed base," Ozzie said.
8:35 a.m. PST: First mention of "Three screens and a cloud." That's a phrase we're likely to hear a lot. It's Microsoft parlance for the three most important devices--PCs, phones, and TVs, as well as Internet services that connect all of those devices.
Ozzie also promises Microsoft will improve Internet Explorer--delivering the "best Internet browser without compromise."
Ozzie mentions what we'll hear at PDC--but also a few topics that will have to wait a bit.
He said people will have to wait until spring to to hear in detail about updates to Windows Live. He also said Microsoft will use its spring Mix show in Las Vegas to let developers know how to write code for the next generation of Windows phone.
8:38 a.m. PST: Loic LeMeur, founder and CEO of Seesmic, is talking about how that company is using Silverlight to help it get Seesmic onto more devices. Shows a Silverlight prototype of Seesmic's Twitter application. He also announces immediate availability of Seesmic for Windows.
8:45 a.m. PST: Ozzie shifts to Azure.
"It was only one year ago at PDC '08 that we launched Windows Azure...by launching our community technology preview," Ozzie said.
The technology preview will continue through end of the year. Windows Azure will switch to a production service on January 1. During January, the company will validate and test its payment and billing systems. First bills will be for February usage.
Tens of thousands of developers have used Windows Azure, Ozzie said.
8:50 a.m. PST: Ozzie said that Azure will be hosted in pairs of data centers in each region, starting in January.
In the U.S., Azure will run at facilities in Chicago and San Antonio, Texas. In Europe, Microsoft will tap spots in Dublin and Amsterdam, while in Asia, facilities are in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Microsoft is moving to data centers that house servers not in racks, but in self-contained shipping containers. Microsoft brought one of its containers here to the show floor. (For those not here, check out the piece I did when I toured the Chicago facility.)
A handful of Azure customers are going into production starting today, Ozzie said, including Automattic, the maker of WordPress. Founder Matt Mullenweg now on stage.
8:58 a.m. PST: Mullenweg invites up someone from I Can Haz Cheezburger. The "Cheezburger Network" is launching a new Azure-based Web Site--Oddlyspecific.com--a site devoted to funny and interesting signs.
9:04 a.m. PST: Ozzie announces a new Azure subsystem. Code-named Dallas, it's an open catalog and marketplace for data, both public and commercial.
"Dallas might catalyze a whole new wave of remixing and experimentation for developers," Ozzie said. Dallas can be found on Microsoft's Pinpoint site. Early partners include NASA, InfoUSA, and AP Online.
9:10 a.m. PST: Microsoft shows a demo using 3D imagery from the Mars rover using NASA's "Dallas" data feed. So that's what the 3D glasses on our seat were for.
9:14 a.m. PST: U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra joins via satellite to talk about how opening up data can help tap a broader pool of researchers, such as what NASA is doing with the Pathfinder rover data. Anyone who wants to go use the data can go to this Web site, he said.
U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra shows off a new job-finder application--on an iPhone--at Microsoft's developer conference.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)He also shows a career finder application built on government data that can help people find jobs near them. Most interesting is the fact that he is demonstrating the app on an iPhone.
9:20 a.m. PST: Ozzie is summing up, telling people to bet on Microsoft. "When thinking about the experience part of your apps, bet on Windows, bet on Windows 7," Ozzie said. You should also bet on Azure.
"These services are ready for business now," Ozzie said.
Finally, he said, pay attention to all the data that we can now gather.
"Our world and our systems are increasingly wired with sensors, recording tons of data," Ozzie said. But, he said, "this data does no good unless we turn the potential into the kinetic...Let's dream and then let's build."
9:23 a.m. PST: Ozzie is done, handing off to Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business.
Muglia begins by trying to explain what is generally understood by the cloud.
"We're all learning together, but one thing that has become really clear is the cloud is more than about infrastructure," Muglia said. "It's also about an application model."
9:25 a.m. PST: Bing runs on more than 100,000 servers. That would be too much to manage using standard server management, Muglia said. The human cost would be too high. Instead, it has an "autopilot" management system.
"When things fail, they just go offline," Muglia said.
9:35 a.m. PST: We're off in geekland now. Don Box, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, and Chris Anderson, a partner architect at Microsoft, have started coding. I'm pretty sure that most of the people who can understand what they are saying are in this auditorium. (And I'm not one of them.)
9:50 a.m. PST: OK, coding time is over. Muglia is back showing various customers including Kelley Blue Book and Domino's Pizza. Domino's says Azure is nifty because it has peak demand on Super Bowl Sunday that is twice that of any other day.
9:55 a.m. PST: Muglia announces Project Sydney, which allows businesses to connect their own servers with services that are running on Azure. Sydney will be in beta next year.
Muglia said Microsoft has been working on Sydney for a while, understanding that businesses are going to continue to run services in-house and need to connect those to the broader cloud.
10:00 a.m. PST: Muglia also is announcing a beta of an application server for Windows Server called AppFabric. The system will be available in beta next year for Azure as well. (AppFabric combines hosting and caching technologies previously code-named Dublin and Velocity, Microsoft said.)
Microsoft also plans to offer Windows Server virtual machine support next year, Muglia said.
10:03 a.m. PST: Microsoft's press release for the Day 1 keynote is out. Among things I haven't mentioned, Microsoft has finalized the code for its Windows Identity Foundation and is announcing the beta of ASP.Net MVC2 (now that's a mouthful).
10:30 a.m. PST: Muglia is wrapping up. Reiterates that Visual Studio 2010 is coming in the first half of next year. An updated version of System Center that helps manage private clouds and helps start to span into hosted and public cloud environments will be in beta next year.
Muglia also clarifies that Azure's second European and both Asian data centers will come on line next year.
"We're investing in this infrastructure all around the world so you don't have to," Muglia says,
Keynote ends.
Update at 9:20 a.m. PDT: Comments from Lili Cheng added.
Ray Ozzie is getting more social.
No, the infrequent blogger and Microsoft's chief software architect has not decided to Twitter his every move. Rather, Ozzie has set up a new social computing lab at Microsoft, to be headed by Microsoft Research veteran Lili Cheng.
The Future Social Experiences (FUSE) group brings together three existing efforts: Cheng's creative systems group from Microsoft Research and two units that were already part of Ozzie's world--the Media Labs and Startup Labs group.
Ozzie sent an e-mail Thursday to Microsofties talking about the move and its importance.
Lili Cheng
(Credit: Microsoft)"The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where 'social' meets sharing; where 'social' meets real-time; where 'social' meets media; where 'social' meets search; where 'social' meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices," Ozzie wrote in the memo, which was seen by CNET News.
"FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they're already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with 'leapfrog' efforts. Working closely with (Microsoft Research) and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company's extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity."
In the memo, Ozzie also noted the changing nature of social computing.
"For many years, technology-based 'social' innovations have been most commonly viewed through the lenses of communications and collaboration: messaging, chat, calls, meetings, conferences, co-editing, document sharing, collaboration, multiplayer gaming and the like," Ozzie said.
"More recently, many factors have begun to transform all that which is 'social': the ever-present, high-bandwidth internet both wired and wireless; the ease of connecting people; the dramatic rise in digital cameras, camera phones and 'app-capable' phones; net-connected game consoles & TVs; and so on."
Cheng, who will head the new lab, has specialized in social computing but has also worked in other areas, including helping Microsoft's Jim Allchin with the design of Windows Vista.
The new group will consist of around 80 people initially, Cheng said in an interview Thursday.
She noted that social computing is becoming central to all types of computing tasks, from gaming to search to business.
"When you think of what people do on their PCs, so much of it is (to) connect to other people and view information shared with them by their friends," Cheng said. "That's what people do on their computers."
The challenge, she said, is that personal computers weren't really designed with that in mind. Even networking, she notes, was an afterthought.
"It just feels early to me," Cheng said. "It feels like nothing works really well."
Businesses in particular, are still trying to figure out how to adapt social computing into their world, which also has rules and boundaries.
Although Microsoft has been doing a lot of research in social networking, the company is often not thought of as a leader in the area--something Cheng hopes will change.
"I'd love when people think of those tools to think of Microsoft," she said.
Cheng, who spoke to me just after meeting with her new team in Cambridge, Mass., said she is still trying to get a handle on all of the projects now in her purview.
"I didn't even have a chance to tweet myself," Cheng said.
Microsoft made other changes on Wednesday in its engineering ranks, shifting several projects under the auspices of Peter Loforte, general manager of Engineering Excellence and Technical Strategy & Community. Loforte will now head a team that includes the company's engineering "excellence," technical community, strategic technical recruiting, distributed development strategy, as well as the technical strategy team responsible for ThinkWeek--Microsoft's brainstorming process that used to be headed by Bill Gates, who would amass technical papers from across the company and review them twice a year.
Ray Ozzie, speaking Thursday at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto, in a discussion moderated by Wired's Steven Levy.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)PALO ALTO, Calif.--Ray Ozzie tends to see things much like a Seattle meteorologist--always cloudy.
Making a trip to sunny Silicon Valley, Ozzie addressed Silicon Valley's Churchill Club, outlining the transformational role that cloud computing will play.
As he discussed that vision, moderator Steven Levy asked if Microsoft itself was sufficiently cloudy when he had arrived.
"The Hailstorm had passed," Ozzie quipped, making a reference to Microsoft's widely panned first attempt to offer cloud services.
In seriousness, though, Ozzie said that Microsoft wasn't really cloud-focused when he joined the company, following Microsoft's purchase of his Groove Networks.
"Respectfully, they were very busy working on things that would become Vista and Office 2007," he said. "There was a lot of 'PC' thinking. I worked with Steve and Bill on change management and that's what I have been doing."
Ozzie declined to agree with Levy's assertion, however, that perhaps packaged software was the buggy whip of our times.
"No," Ozzie said. "Different market segments want to consume value in different.
The goal of the cloud era, he said, is to create a world in which applications are sandboxed like the browser, cached like Javascript and all the data fully synchronized.
Levy suggested that perhaps that kind of world might be bad for Microsoft's Windows business, but Ozzie disagreed.
"We'll always need an OS," he said. "Every device needs an OS. The programming model on top's of that OS is what's changing."
Ozzie said the key is making sure that operating system is "contemporary and relevant."
The Netbook factor
Netbooks really are an opportunity, he insisted. "We have to write an OS other than XP runs on it, and we've done that with Windows 7."
He expanded later on, noting that what most users really want in a Netbook is actually a full-fledged PC that can do more than just browse the Web.
"The Netbook as consumers have spoken for it is a laptop," he said. "People expect Office for it. They expect to be able to go to Download.com...and download for it." (Editors' note: Download.com is a property of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.)
As for ARM-based devices, or other non-Windows products, Ozzie noted that historically consumers haven't bought keyboard-based devices that weren't full computers.
"I'm not writing it off," he said. "If it happens and if it happens in volume it will be a different type of device."
But he said. "I believe the X86 instuction set and Intel and AMD Netbooks...they are going to be the majority of what's out there."
Levy also pressed Ozzie on what it's like now that Bill Gates has been gone from full-time work for just about a year.
"He writes, he calls, but infrequently," Ozzie said. He said Gates remains involved on a few key projects. He's also just an e-mail away, when he or others have concerns.
Some things have changed, he said, such as the company's review process as well as its famed ThinkWeek in which employees from all over Microsoft would submit hundreds of papers for Gates' review.
"Bill has an amazing ability to consume very quickly," Ozzie said. "A thousand some papers would come in for each Think Week. He would go off to a cabin and sequester himself. He would probably read a couple hundred of them. People loved it."
However, Ozzie said that ThinkWeek, as it was set up was "a very Bill-unique thing"
"I don't think that's something we want to reproduce," Ozzie said. The replacement for that, he said, is a process in which a broader set of technical people offer their thoughts on new ideas.
"People like feedback--senior technical feedback," Ozzie said.
Steering the ship
Ozzie noted that Microsoft is a bigger company than the one he competed against during his time at Lotus and Groove.
"We always were amazed at how quickly the ship could turn," Ozzie said. "But that was a different era. It was a smaller company."
In trying to change Microsoft, Ozzie said he has tried both things very much in the company's tradition--his Internet services disruption memo was modeled on Gates' missives--as well as in ways that are less familiar, such as trying to break down the company's well known organizational structure, with software developers working in offices and corresponding over email.
Levy asked Ozzie how many companies have the ability to build the kinds of data centers that Microsoft and Google are building.
"Not too many," he said. When asked about who will be there for the long term, Ozzie wasn't ready to include Amazon in that list.
"I don't know about Amazon," he said. "They are the leader. They have done amazing work, but the level to which you need (to invest) to build it out...it's very substantial."
Ozzie credited an unusual source for Microsoft's position to be able to deliver cloud-based services--its much maligned MSN consumer services. He noted that it was Hotmail and Messenger that gave Microsoft the skills it needed to ultimately build Windows Azure.
"Had we not kept MSN alive...we wouldn't have had those competencies in-house," he said.
It was a rare public speech for Ozzie, who also spoke at an investor conference last month.
Ozzie also spoke about the business side of cloud computing. I captured his answer on video. (Apologies in advance for any quality issues--I'm multitasking).
In the question-and-answer period, Ozzie was asked for his thoughts on Google Wave, the company's recently introduced tool for combined collaboration and messaging.
He praised Google for taking on a big task, but also took issue with their approach saying it is "anti-Web."
"As a system, I think the complexity is an issue," Ozzie said. "The problem, the way the defined it is a complex one."
That said, it will offer insight into whether people want messaging that is distinct, such as e-mail or instant messaging, or whether there is demand for a more integrated product.
"I hope we learn, as an industry, an awful lot from Wave," Ozzie said.
Other questions from the audience ranged from what computer science professors should be teaching to whether Internet Explorer would support HTML 5. Ozzie said he had nothing to announce on the latter front, but added, "It is our commitment to be a world class Web browser, what our competitors like to call a modern web browser. I think you can expect us to do the right thing."
Ray Ozzie is a big believer in the cloud. But he knows that large businesses don't yet share his confidence.
"Enterprises will not really trust the cloud until they get some experience with it," Ozzie said, during a speech at a J.P. Morgan investment conference in Boston on Wednesday. He said that large businesses are more likely to start by going with an online version of a familiar product like Microsoft Exchange than they are today to move a major piece of their business into the cloud. A Webcast of his speech is available on Microsoft's investor relations page.
In October, Microsoft announced Windows Azure, a set of tools that is somewhat akin to a Web-based operating system that developers can use to build software that can then run in Microsoft's data centers. The software is now in testing, with large businesses mostly just kicking the tires at this point.
"In the next year or two I believe that the biggest impact of cloud computing is going to be in things like Exchange and SharePoint for us or those comparable offerings from our competitors," Ozzie said. Using one of those services allows a company to know how much bandwidth they need to communicate with the cloud, understand how cloud services can be managed, as well as just build up a certain comfort level.
"It will work its way into other parts of the enterprise IT environment over time as they get their comfort level," he said.
Ozzie
(Credit: Microsoft)One of the lighter moments came when Ozzie was asked what were the lessons Microsoft learned from Windows Vista.
"How much time do you have?" Ozzie quipped.
Ozzie then went on to discuss some of the problems with Vista, including the false starts that he said resulted from "overcommitment."
"We had a vision that was larger than what we could achieve within the period of time that we needed to bring (the product) to market," Ozzie said.
And by changing its timing and feature set, Ozzie noted that Microsoft's partners were both too early and too late when it came to deciding when to spend time on Vista.
"If we don't give very clear predictable signals to those partners...about dates," Ozzie said, "they don't know when to invest and when not to invest."
The result, he said, was that drivers weren't ready, leaving PC makers in a tough position and ultimately creating a less-than-satisfactory experience for consumers and businesses. Many of those issues, he said, were taken to heart when it came to planning and communicating around Windows 7, he said.
Some of Ozzie's more intriguing comments came when he talked about the need for partnership over time as Microsoft builds out its cloud. So far, Microsoft has built its own data centers, but they have largely been in the U.S. Because of varying regulations in different countries, though, Ozzie talked about the need for data centers "everywhere on earth."
"Every country will have data centers," he said, but added that Microsoft itself doesn't have the resources to build a cloud in each country. "We have to have partners."
Last night I attended the Crunchies award ceremony, where Facebook took top honors as the best overall start-up (See the full list of Crunchies award winners). The awards are based on a popularity contest via votes cast through the Crunchies Web site and with input from the Crunchies Committee, consisting of co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and advisors.
The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft's Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.
Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it's a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform.
David Treadwell and Ray Ozzie discuss the mesh with GigaOm's Om Malik.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)Live Mesh is essential glue for synchronizing files with all the devices a user might touch, and as a kind of information bus for identity, notifications, and other Web services. Microsoft, with its huge footprint, is uniquely positioned to provide a universal, operating system- and device-agnostic syncing foundation.
Ozzie and his team are working on a complete transformation of the back end and the front end, moving from PC-centric to multi-screen, he told me during a brief conversation at the Crunchies. Microsoft's Azure cloud service is another key part of the transformation, but is lagging behind Live Mesh. "2009 is still a learning year for Azure, just as 2008 was the Mesh," Ozzie said.
The challenge for Azure is moving the massive scale Microsoft platforms like XBox Live, to the Azure cloud-services architecture. "In 2009 Azure will be more mature, you'll see some large-scale usage," Ozzie said. But it won't be until 2010 that Azure is ready for prime time.
Ozzie is mindful of the profound changes culturally and technologically among its developers that Microsoft must undergo to realize the Live Platform and Azure cloud services vision. "When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth," he said during a Crunchies interview with Om Malik.
For a photo replay of the Crunchies, check out Andrew Mager's post.
With so many people pointing out the external challenges and internal missteps from Microsoft, it is easy to pile on criticism.
One longtime watcher of the company, Directions on Microsoft, has a new report out looking at five big things the software maker has done right.
The analysis is on the Internet and worth a read.
Directions on Microsoft points to the company's appeal to developers, its focus on software, its reliance on others to sell its products, along with the fact it targets technology for the masses and takes the long view.
For sure, these are the things that have helped the company survive past missteps and address other competitive threats as well. But, through most of the past challenges, Microsoft has been able to largely keep the same business model, something it probably won't be able to do in this next wave of difficulties.
I have no doubt Microsoft will be able to deliver its software as a service and find ways to make money. But whether it will be able to make the same kinds of money in terms of both revenue and profits is a key question.
For more on the man leading the current wave of change, Steven Levy's Wired piece on Ray Ozzie is also definitely worth checking out, as is CNET News' Dan Farber's take on the piece.
In case you have not noticed by the less frequent posts, I'm off this week (well, sort of off anyway). Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Steven Levy writes about Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie in the latest issue of Wired. The nearly 7,000-word profile doesn't offer many new revelations about the software-plus-services or cloud-computing efforts that Ozzie is leading at Microsoft, but it provides a vivid portrait of Ozzie's path from the University of Illinois in 1973 to taking over Bill Gates' software czar responsibilities in 2005.
Ray Ozzie has been on a software journey since his college days at the University of Illinois to fulfill a dream of connectivity.
(Credit: Wired, CNET )Following is an excerpt from Levy's profile characterizing the Gates-Ozzie relationship:
Ozzie left IBM and founded a startup called Groove Networks, which made collaborative software. Released in 2001, the Groove app was terrific technology, with peer-to-peer transmission and superstrong crypto built in. But the postbubble timing was awful, and Ozzie realized that the company couldn't make it on its own.
The obvious move was to sell to Microsoft, which had already invested some $50 million in Groove. For Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, however, getting the technology was just a bonus; the real treasure was its founder. Gates had once described Ozzie as "one of the top five programmers in the universe." Former Groove employees still talk about the time Gates visited and the two leaders got off on a tangent about some arcane technical point. As they bounced improvisations off each other, Ozzie coming up with ideas and Gates rocking back and forth with excitement, it was like watching some propellerhead version of a John Coltrane-Miles Davis performance. Ozzie wouldn't be just a great hire--he would be the hire, the one person qualified to be a partner to Gates and Ballmer in revivifying Microsoft.
In the profile, Ozzie addresses the standard rap on Microsoft -- that it wants to re-create its Windows dominance in the cloud through the use of proprietary standards:
Eric Schmidt, CEO of that G-word company, says that because Microsoft has so much market share in servers and operating systems, the Redmondites will certainly be big players in cloud computing. He sees it as an extension of Microsoft's nasty behavior in the '90s. "Microsoft's basic strategy is to gain enough share in cloud computing to force other people to use its standards," he says. (By contrast, Google has blessed an open source version of its cloud technology, which both IBM and Yahoo have adopted.) Ozzie doesn't buy the charge. "Google and Microsoft have the same basic philosophy. We're basing our cloud on Windows technologies because they're great technologies and we have a lot of higher-level services on them. If you want to write open source stuff on them, you can do that."
One of Ozzie's major challenges to is create a more open and flexible Microsoft, a company that can compete on a more level playing field.
Mitch Kapor, the former head of Lotus Software, where Ozzie's team created Notes, sums up Ozzie's lifelong quest:
To Ozzie, software's soul does not lie in the accumulation of features. Instead, it lies in his dream of connectivity. "Live Mesh is very Ray," Mitch Kapor says. "It's the son of Groove, which is the son of Notes." Which was, of course, the son of Ozzie's beloved Plato. Thirty-three years later, Ozzie is still trying to build on what he saw in sophomore year. But it's no longer the Ray Ozzie vision. It's Microsoft's.
In 2005, Ray Ozzie talked about the coming Live services push and what it would mean. He sent a big memo and held an event in San Francisco. Then he set to work and got pretty darn quiet.
Sure, we got some hints along the way, especially earlier this year when Microsoft launched a preview of Live Mesh.
On Monday, Ozzie finally talked about what he's been up to. Microsoft launched Windows Azure, essentially its long-rumored Cloud OS.
Ray Ozzie
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)In an interview after his keynote on Monday, Ozzie talked about what Azure means for developers, businesses, and even the everyman.
Here's an edited transcript.
Q: One of the selling points of Windows Azure is the idea that it uses some of the same tools that developers already know in terms of .NET. What parts of it translate and what are new skills that developers are going to have to learn?
Ozzie: The day-to-day writing of code, and many of the modules that they may have already built in their products will translate fairly readily. But things that are fundamentally different tend to be at the application framework level, meaning the fundamental assumption in Windows Azure is that there is no single point of failure. No computer by going down will take down your application. So, if your app is not written in that way--is not written to handle this one going down and this other copy of itself taking over,-then fundamentally the application pattern does have to change. Most applications will not run that way out of the box.
How does this all come together for developers? What is the time frame when people are going to really get their hands on this?
Ozzie: Well, for the people who are here, who can register today, and then later when others get it, they should download the SDK, download the Visual Studio Express if they don't have it, and begin to play with it, register and start uploading code to the cloud; (to) understand the nature of the environment. For people who have used our systems before, it will initially seem familiar, but when they restart their computers, the hard disks are empty. There are certain aspects of it that feel different...For somebody who has used (Amazon's) EC2, it will be a lot easier to get up to speed, because there are some concepts that are carried across.
I talked to Amazon last week to get a sense of what they're doing. They were like "we offer choice; you can do Windows or Linux." Why do you need or want a separate operating system in the cloud and what are the benefits?
Ozzie: I think the biggest benefit is that we've raised the level of abstraction up to this thing that we refer to as a service model where you declare in a very model-based way the different pieces of your application--which pieces need to run close together, which pieces need to run far apart from each other for redundancy. And you might give hints that I want this running in a different datacenter. You give it hints, if there's a high demand, on how high you're willing to let it go in terms of how much you're willing to pay for how long, and so on. You basically express this and you let the system just deal with it. There's much less manual effort by the developer or by the operations personnel in provisioning another virtual machine, turning off another virtual machine; it's kind of automated.
One of the things about Windows Azure is it's running in Microsoft's datacenters. Obviously it leverages the big investment you guys have made for your own software and your own Internet services. Do you want to be in that business long term of being the world's computer?
Ozzie: It's a business that we will be in probably as long as there will be a Microsoft. We have our own myriad properties that are all going to the Web. Every one of our properties, from the pure Web properties like MSN that are just services, to things that you've seen like Exchange and SharePoint that have enterprise presence and service, everything has a service component. So, even selfishly we need to have very, very high scale services.
We have very good relationships with our enterprise customers and the developers that serve those customers, and we really believe that by collocating those apps with our apps, it's an extremely important thing.
There's also an issue of trust. Cloud computing is ultimately going to be 'do you trust this provider to have more to lose than I have to lose as a company if they mess me up?' And Microsoft has both the capacity to invest and the willingness to be in that end of a business, and give that kind of a trust assurance to developers and enterprises.
Looking out three or five years, what do you think the balance will be in terms of enterprises running software in the way that they do today versus living in the cloud? Obviously Microsoft is making a bet that there's going to be a balance.
Ozzie: Purely speculative based on the things that I've learned. Infrastructure will be a no-brainer. The things where there isn't unique business value added to a given system, such as e-mail infrastructure is a good example, phones, videoconferencing, or live meetings. And as long as we achieve the performance objectives and cost objectives that they want, I see no reason why those are not going to migrate very, very quickly to the cloud, except in government environments where they have separate networks that are disconnected from the Internet.
In terms of business applications, it's really going to take longer because there are different businesses for a variety of reasons in terms of the risk profile, the regulatory environment of a given industry, how much you bring your customer data online, that's going to take a little bit longer. Some companies might do it quickly.
What we've seen is that business units within big companies (who) pick up on it, use it for a rapid application, might throw it away. They'll experiment with it. But in terms of the strategic enterprise apps, it might take a little longer.
Part of this is about shifting the costs from companies running their own datacenters to taking advantage of the scale that Microsoft brings, but I imagine another piece of this vision is the types of applications that can only exist.
Ozzie: That's exactly right.
We only saw one example of an Azure application today. What are the kinds of things that can be done, and has Microsoft done some things that really are only possible with Azure?
Ozzie: I think some of the benefits of some of the things that have emerged during this Web 2.0 era relate to things that you can do when you aggregate and utilize the activities of many, many people who are hitting your site. I think those kinds of things will become more broadly done by enterprises and other customers than they are done today. They're not very mainstream. Amazon is a leader in using those kinds of techniques. But for the most part, most Web sites' experiences today are very monolithic. I think in terms of the short term, it's mainly going to be the infrastructural (adoption).
So, how does the business of this shape up for Microsoft? It's free while it's a developer preview. How does the business look? When does it become a business for Microsoft and how does it compare to Microsoft's existing businesses?
Ozzie: Well, when we finally determine that it achieves the objectives from a completeness perspective and a reliability perspective that our customers would expect of us, then we'll go commercial. And when it does, it will be profitable from birth because we're going to price it to be that way.
If you looked at that layer cake that you saw on the screen with the foundation and the middle services and the top, the margins increase as you go up that stack. At the top of the stack it's value-based pricing because it's a solution. At the bottom it's really more or less the resource utilization, the margin on top of that resource utilization and combined with an SLA.
What should the average person take away from today's announcement or the average computer enthusiast who is not a developer?
Ozzie: It's a new kind of computer that 20 years from now we'll wonder how we did without. We know about PCs, we know about servers. Every company right now runs their own Web site and they're always afraid of what might happen if it becomes too popular. This gives kind of an overdraft protection for the people who run their Web sites. By letting us run that piece of their Web site or them running it on our infrastructure, they don't have to worry about the capacity; they can worry about what they're trying to do with it.
LOS ANGELES--With only a couple of examples shown Monday of programs running on Windows Azure, I started to wonder just how far along things are with the cloud OS.
In an interview, corporate VP Amitabh Srivastava tried to set me straight.
"Windows Azure is at an early stage," he said, "It is real, but it is at an early stage."
In addition to the BlueHoo application shown on stage, Windows Azure was used to build Microsoft's Live Mesh and is also being used to build the next generation of Live Meeting.
"Ultimately the goal is to move all our properties," Srivastava said.
Srivastava also explained another question that was in my head. What was up with his bright red sneakers? I suspected, correctly, that it had to do with the fact that Azure was code-named "Red Dog."
The version of Azure that Microsoft is rolling out now is a community technology preview that lacks a number of features that Microsoft is working to quickly add, he said.
In particular, only software written in managed code, essentially .Net, can currently run. Internally, the company has other types of native code running, with plans to offer that to outside customers sometime next year.
In honor of announcing Windows Azure, which had been code-named Red Dog, corporate VP Amitabh Srivastava sported these red sneakers with his suit Monday.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)Services also must be built on a set of pre-designed templates, he said, though Microsoft plans to add more templates and ideally, allow services that don't follow any sort of template. Also, for now, Azure services will be running in a single Microsoft data center (the Quincy, Wash. facility). Sometime next year, Microsoft will expand that to other U.S. data centers and eventually move overseas, though that brings with it its own set of geopolitical issues that Srivastava said that the company would just as soon wait to tackle.
Microsoft also expects it will take some time for businesses to move major applications to Azure. For now, the company would be happy if developers just start learning about Azure and playing around with its software developer kit, senior VP Bob Muglia said in an interview.
"Realistically, companies won't be deploying applications for a year or more but there is a lot to learn," Muglia said. "There are new things they need to learn, to understand."
