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.
LOS ANGELES--Although Microsoft intends to talk a bit about its plans for the future of Internet Explorer this week, the company won't offer preview code of its next browser, CNET has learned.
The software maker is also not planning to announce a move to the WebKit engine, as some had speculated.
Ray Ozzie, speaking Tuesday at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)In his opening keynote at the Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie pledged that Microsoft will make Internet Explorer the absolute best Windows browser, but did not offer further details.
Microsoft is expected to talk more about its browser plans as part of Wednesday's keynote speech. During that talk, he is expected to talk about some--but not all--of its "focus areas" for the next browser version, a Microsoft representative told CNET.
The latest version of IE 8 was released in March and is also built into Windows 7. Despite the new release, though, Microsoft faces intense competition from Firefox as well as from Google and Apple.
In addition, Microsoft has struggled to get Internet Explorer users to move past IE 6.
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.
When Ray Ozzie first landed at Microsoft in 2005, he found a company with lots of good ideas. He also found things were getting in the way of innovation, everything from businesses that weren't thinking about the broader company strategy to the way Microsoft stationed each of its workers in their own office.
As the new chief software architect set out to work on Microsoft's cloud-based strategy, he also started doing his part to shift that corporate culture. To house his team, Ozzie had Microsoft tear up its typical floor plan. Instead of tons of hallways and offices, Ozzie wanted lots of common space and whiteboards everywhere. Once a notable oddity at Microsoft, such work areas have become increasingly common in recent years.
Ray Ozzie, chief software architect,
Microsoft
Ozzie also quickly set to work on changing Microsoft's product development, first detailing his plans publicly in a 2005 memo, titled the "Internet Services Disruption."
In the missive, Ozzie talked about the emergence of advertising as a business model for software, new ways of delivering software, and the need to make things simpler in an era where users are inundated with technology choices. Ozzie and company Chairman Bill Gates talked about a wave of "Live" software that would extend Microsoft's products with new Internet-based services.
Ozzie challenged the company that it was faced with new challenges and aggressive competitors that threatened its cash cows, but was careful to only rock the boat so hard.
"In assessing where we are and where we need to be, some new efforts will surely require incubation," Ozzie wrote in 2005. "But in many areas we have 80 percent of the product and technical infrastructure already built--we just need to close the 20 percent gap."
The extent to which Ozzie has managed to reshape Microsoft's product and culture since then will be on display this week, as Microsoft hosts a major conference for its developers in Los Angeles.
Azure, Office unveilings
At the Professional Developer Conference, as the event is known, Microsoft is expected to announce the commercial launch of Windows Azure as well as a beta version of its Office 2010 software. Ozzie is set to speak on Tuesday, while office unit senior vice president Kurt DelBene will be part of Wednesday's keynote address.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
The arrival of those two products shows just how much has changed since Ozzie's memo.
Shown for the first time at last year's PDC, Windows Azure is the operating system re-imagined for the cloud computing era. Instead of controlling a local PC or server, Azure is designed as a platform where developers write programs that run from inside Microsoft's massive data centers. Microsoft and customers have been testing Azure since then as part of a free technology preview. Starting in February, though, Microsoft plans to start charging based on how much computing resources a customer is using.
Office, while one of Microsoft's core products, is in the midst of a major shift. Amid competition from Web-based rivals such as Google Apps, the product is morphing into a number of different forms, everything from the traditional desktop suite, to a hosted Web service, to free browser-based applications.
Showing off other wares
Beyond Azure and Office, Microsoft will also be talking about other topics ranging from identity systems to developer tools.
It will also be showing some new technology coming out of its labs--highlighting some closer ties between the company's research unit and its product groups.
Live Labs head Gary Flake is scheduled to show off "a new approach to exploring information on the Web."
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Seadragon unit is showing off a couple new projects. Seadragon is known for a "deep zoom" technology that allows a user to dive into an image, going from a wide angle to the finest grain of detail.
One of the group's new efforts--Snapdragon--is designed as a new concept approach to image search. "Snapdragon utilizes Flickr images to prototype what image search would be if, instead of searching, we allowed users to explore images and the relationships between them," Microsoft said on its Web site.
The other is a collection of work by artist Chris Jordan. Jordan's work is particularly well suited to Snapdragon's deep zoom since it uses thousands of everyday objects to create a broader image. In one picture, for example, Jordan uses thousands of cigarette packs to recreate Van Gogh's smoking skull portrait. In another, Jordan uses soda cans to recreate a Seurat painting.
But more than any one product or technology, PDC will serve as a chance to check back and see what impact Ozzie has made with that 2005 memo and in the years since.
For some groups, Ozzie's memo was a codification of what they were already doing. Corporate vice president Dave Thompson, who was running Microsoft's Exchange team at the time, said his group was already moving in that direction--having already bought FrontBridge and PlaceWare--acquisitions that became Live Meeting and Exchange Hosted Services. Plus, Microsoft had started its pilot program with Energizer to see what other sorts of services it might be able to take on for large businesses.
"When Ray sent his memo, it was a broad call-to-action that was a great affirmation and a rallying point for the efforts already underway," Thompson said in an e-mail interview.
But Ozzie acknowledged that the shift to services--and the transition from Bill Gates' style to his--was more jarring for others.
"My engagement style is far different from Bill's," Ozzie said in a recently published interview with analysts from Gartner. "For a number of groups, that has worked out really well. With others, there are challenges. Some people have a different style or a different view of how they want to take it."
Ozzie says that Gates was supportive of the places that his successor wanted to take the company, but also said that neither he nor Gates really knew how to get there.
"In those days, I had conversations with Bill and he'd say, 'Well that's pretty dramatic or radical in terms of what you are trying to accomplish. It's the right thing to do and if you do it, that will be great,' " Ozzie recalled in the Gartner interview. "And I said, 'How?' And he'd say, 'I don't know. It starts with a memo, and I don't know what happens after that.'"
Nonetheless, Ozzie says, Microsoft has gotten where he hoped the company would get. "When I look back and I read the memo, so many of the things that I had written have come to pass, not because I drove them to make it happen, but because the organization made it happen. It may have happened a little differently here or there, but it happened. So, I'm very pleased about that."
Of course, CNET News will be on hand to see what else Ozzie and team have in store, so check back throughout the week to catch our live, ongoing coverage of the event.
Unlike when you stand over your coworker's desk, Microsoft's Bing search engine actually works better when you hover.
One of the key features of the would-be rival to Google is that when you hover to the right of a result, you can get a preview of what to expect. As part of an update this week, Bing's hover result will now feature more information including a thumbnail preview of the site in question.
Microsoft is using Wolfram Alpha to help power certain results, such as this search for the fat content of french fries.
(Credit: CNET News)One of the ongoing challenges for Bing, besides just getting more people to use the site, is letting them know that the hover feature is there. Microsoft's research has shown it gets high usage from those who know about it, but also finds that lots of people don't know the feature is there. Microsoft has been experimenting with some different visual cues that might make it easier to stumble upon the previews.
The hover feature was developed by the San Francisco-based team that Microsoft acquired as part of last year's acquisition of Powerset. Powerset, which developed a semantic search technology, also powers Bing's index of Wikipedia.
Bing's fall update update also includes the first fruits of a deal with Wolfram Alpha. As part of that arrangement, certain health related searches, such as "how many calories in a hamburger" will now feature information from Alpha. Bing will also rely on Alpha for some math calculations, Microsoft said in a blog posting on Wednesday. Wolfram noted that Microsoft is one of the first customers for a commercial licensing program that was formally announced several weeks ago.
Other changes to Bing include improved local results for topics such as weather and events.
It's all part of a wave of updates Microsoft is making to Bing this week. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is moving its MSN Video site under the Bing umbrella, with a new video page that can be used to watch videos from places like Hulu and elsewhere.
The company also announced some enhancements to Bing Maps, including the ability to use the mouse to alter a suggested route and have one's directions re-calculated.
The improvements come as Microsoft is looking for ways to stand out from Google as it tries to wrest share from its much larger rival. The software maker has seen a modest uptick but faces steep hurdles in trying to make more significant gains.
Experian Hitwise said Wednesday that Bing's share reached 9.57 percent in October. That's up from 8.96 percent in September, but still well behind Google, which had more than 70 percent and Yahoo, with 16 percent of the U.S. search query market.
While adding features is clearly important, trying to stay ahead in the search game can be quite a challenge. Just hours after Microsoft announced a deal last month to index real-time tweets from Twitter, Google announced plans to do the same.
Microsoft has also gotten some unwanted attention for one of its features--the Bing Cashback program--where users can get a portion of their online transactions rebated by starting off on Bing. A blog posting outlined a flaw in the mechanism that could allow people to get cash back without ever spending money via Bing.
That posting was pulled after a
Microsoft said on Tuesday that it is merging its video search efforts with its MSN Video site into a new page that will bear the Bing moniker.
Bing Video, Microsoft said, will serve as a site for watching everything from viral videos to full-length TV shows and video, drawing on content deals with sites such as Hulu, CBS, MySpace, DailyMotion, and YouTube.
The new Bing Video page replaces MSN Video and includes both video search as well as content from sites such as Hulu and CBS.
(Credit: Microsoft)Microsoft notes that video is now a mainstay of the redesigned MSN home page and says MSN will continue to create original programming, such as its "Last Night on TV" effort.
The branding remains a challenge though, as evidenced by a video from Microsoft's Rob Bennett talking about the changes. The video, embedded below, features a "view more on MSN Video" link that, when clicked on, takes a user to the new Bing Video site.
The new Bing Video page is part of a series of changes Microsoft is making as part of a fall refresh of its search site. Earlier on Tuesday, Microsoft made some enhancements to Bing Maps, including the ability to use the mouse to alter a suggested route and have one's directions re-calculated.
The company said to expect more announcements later this week.
Disclaimer: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
Vitamin D, a start-up formed by three ex-Palm executives, is releasing a public beta of software that consumers can use to detect human motion in their security cameras and create rules on what to do when someone is spotted coming or going.
(Credit: Vitamin D)The great thing about security cameras is the fact that they let you record things without needing to have a human being physically there.
The downside is that, in most cases, it takes a human being to figure out whether there is anything interesting there. Sure, there is motion-sensing technology, but such systems are often fooled by animals, cars, or even by a tree rustling in the wind.
Three former Palm executives think they have some software that could help shake things up. Their company, Vitamin D, is releasing a public beta on Monday of software that can detect and isolate human motion, potentially allowing the growing number of surveillance cameras out there to be a whole lot more useful.
The software, which works on either PCs or Macs, puts a yellow box around any human motion it detects and can be further refined to show only someone coming or going from a particular area--say entering or leaving through a particular door. The software is designed to work with any IP camera or even an inexpensive Web cam.
Getting in the surveillance game is admittedly a bit of a shift for early Palm employees Greg Shirai and Rob Haitani--two guys who have spent most of their careers creating consumer gadgets.
But, after years of listening to Palm and Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins talk about his brain research, Shirai and Haitani, along with Celeste Baranksi, another ex-Palm executive, thought they had a way to make a business out of it. "We were always fascinated by what Jeff was doing," Shirai said. Vitamin D's software is powered by artificial intelligence technology licensed from Hawkins' Numenta start-up.
Shirai and Haitani say they are starting with the security camera industry because that's the first application the technology can be used in. But over time, they hope to refine the technology such that it can have broader uses, such as powering object-based search within video streams.
Haitani gave a preview of the technology at this year's Demo conference. There's also a video of the technology in action on Vitamin D's Web site.
Using artificial intelligence makes the system remarkably adaptable, Haitani said, something that is not the case even with very high-end systems that use various rules to try to identify humans.
Vitamin D's software, for example, is able to pick out two people carrying a lawn mower, someone crawling, or even a person pushing a stroller--all shapes that don't look a lot like what an algorithm might think of as human.
"You can see how the shape-based rules quickly break down," Haitani said.
The technology isn't perfect. It isn't well suited to nighttime work, or anything where there isn't sufficient light. "We actually would not do well in poorly lit scenes," Shirai said.
Shirai and Haitani have been using the software at their homes and office to try it out. They haven't caught any thieves yet, though there was one scare, Shirai said.
He noticed a group of people struggling at the company's front door early one morning.
"I thought, oh my gosh, there are these people breaking into our office," Shirai said. In reality, he had found something far less sinister--what time his office's cleaning crew came each day.
Haitani said he also learned that his house is frequented by hummingbirds when he is not there. "Apparently my front lawn is this crossing path," he said.
For those who have security cameras, particularly consumers and small businesses, Vitamin D's software can offer significant time savings. Going through all the motions detected in hundreds of hours of video--even if one only spends 5 seconds on each clip--could require hours of work. By contrast, narrowing it down to just humans might cut that workload down to just minutes, as the two demonstrated last week, showing me examples from their collection of surveillance tapes.
The software will be free during the public beta, though the company hopes to start charging for a final version in the first half of next year.
Other potential customers could be law enforcement or even the intelligence community. Indeed, In-Q-Tel, the investment vehicle for the intelligence community, is among Vitamin D's early investors, along with HTC, the cell phone maker that Haitani and Shirai know well from their Palm days.
T-Mobile said on Wednesday that a software glitch was to blame for a massive outage on Tuesday that left many customers unable to send or receive calls or text messages.
"After investigating the cause, we have determined that a back-end system software error had generated abnormal congestion on the network," T-Mobile said in a statement. "T-Mobile has since implemented additional measures to help prevent this from happening in the future."
The wireless service provider did not say which software caused the issue.
"We again apologize to those customers who were affected and may have been inconvenienced," T-Mobile said. I've also asked the carrier what, if any, compensation it plans to give those who were without service.
The service disruption began on Tuesday afternoon and lasted, for some, until late into the evening Pacific Time.
T-Mobile has stated that the outage affected about 5 percent of its users.
Aiming to stay relevant, Microsoft is introducing a new look for its MSN.com home page.
Although MSN gets far less attention than the company's Bing or Windows Live efforts, the home page remains an important economic engine for Microsoft's online business, as well as a significant source of search traffic for Bing.
Along with redesigning the MSN home page, Microsoft also gave the site's butterfly logo a new look.
(Credit: Microsoft)"We believe it's an important asset for Microsoft," said MSN general manager Bob Visse.
The site is still the top portal in about 25 of the 46 markets, with about 600 million unique users globally and 100 million in the U.S, where it trails Yahoo in popularity.
The redesign, which has been in the works for months, bears quite a bit of resemblance to the one that Microsoft had been testing in France.
Microsoft late Tuesday began rolling out the new MSN home page (click for preview), which it says will become widely available in the U.S. early in 2010.
With its new look, the home page has about half as many links as the previous incarnation, focusing instead on a few categories, such as video, news, shopping, and search.
The old site had dozens of text links at the top and bottom of the page for everything from horoscopes to white pages to a free trial of MSN's dial-up Internet service.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see this is a very cluttered and busy site," Visse said of the existing page.
The company has, in the past, tried to make changes that its users saw as too radical, such as a 2007 overhaul of Hotmail that the company was forced to significantly scale back. Visse said he isn't as worried about that, given that users were already complaining that the site was both dated and overstuffed with links.
"We were, frankly, at a point where customers are complaining about the clutter," he said.
Microsoft is also trying to tap into the popularity of social networks, adding a column on the right-hand side that lets users peek at their Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook feeds, and even update their status or post a tweet. As before, users can also see a preview of their Hotmail in-box.
But it will take its time in jumping on the Web apps bandwagon, with plans to offer several Silverlight-based apps on the right-hand side of the redesigned page at a later date. In the past, MSN users have not customized their pages to a large degree, and so Microsoft is going to take a wait-and-see approach before it decides whether it will roll out more apps than the Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook apps available at launch.
By contrast, Yahoo, perhaps MSN's largest competitor, has bet the farm on the popularity of Web apps on the home page, redesigning the entire Yahoo experience with that in mind. It's still early, but since the redesign went live Yahoo has seen a 20 percent increase in the amount of time spent on the home page, it said last week.
The company has decided to scrap altogether a more radical overhaul that it tested in Brazil. That site, geared towards Brazil's highly social online population, allowed people to share videos by dragging the video screen onto a contact in one's social network.
"It was too radical, even for that audience," Visse said. "It's not going to ship for a final release."
MSN was among the Microsoft units hit by companywide layoffs earlier this year, but things have stabilized, Visse said.
"I wouldn't say we are growing headcount, but we aren't reducing," he said.
The 2009 redesign of MSN features a new logo and new look with fewer links and more videos and images.
(Credit: Microsoft)Correction, 6:35 a.m. PDT: This story initially gave an incorrect launch date for the new MSN home page.
Microsoft said Monday that it's cutting by a third the subscription prices for the hosted versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, and Office Communications Server.
The software maker plans to cut the monthly per-user cost of licensing all three products from $15 to $10, while the cost of licensing individual products is also dropping by as much as 50 percent. The move comes as Microsoft faces continued pressure from rivals, including Google.
Capossela
(Credit: Microsoft)Last week, the city of Los Angeles voted to go ahead with a deal to shift many employees to Google Apps from Microsoft Office.
In an interview, Microsoft Vice President Chris Capossela said the move has less to do with competitive pressure than that "it's the price that customers are really excited to buy our suite at."
,p> "We're pretty excited about the price and not so much focused on free services or the price Google or others might charge," Capossela said.In addition to the price drop, Microsoft is also touting several new customers and announced its plan to bring the year-old Microsoft Online services to more than a dozen new countries.
The company is announcing its commercial launch in Singapore, as well as trials in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Poland, Romania, and Taiwan. Microsoft also expects to have commercial availability in India later this year.
Among the new customers are McDonalds, Aon, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Rexel Group. They join existing customers, such as Blockbuster, Coca-Cola and Autodesk as those paying Microsoft to run hosted versions of its products. Microsoft formally launched Microsoft Online at a San Francisco event a year ago.
Next week, Microsoft will also formally launch Exchange 2010 at its TechEd Berlin developer event. Microsoft said last month that it had finalized the product. Traditionally, Microsoft has developed products first as a server and only later, if at all, customized them to run in hosted form.
Exchange 2010, though, was designed first as an online service and then crafted into a product that businesses can run on their own servers.
