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.
This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war, but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.
Ray Ozzie explains Azure to CNET News correspondent Ina Fried.
As in past epochs in its 33-year history, Microsoft ties its success to the developer community, having an army of loyal, or at least well or modestly compensated, software warriors. The Microsoft mantra is: "Build a platform and an ecosystem of developers, partners, fans, and people willing to spend their money will follow." A compelling platform and the potential to reach a large audience of buyers, which Microsoft can deliver, attract the developers, who build the applications and services that attract consumers and business users.
Microsoft also now understands that its platform must span every kind of device--PC, notebook, smartphone, car, home, etc.--and offline scenarios. Microsoft missed the Web search revolution, but it's not going to miss out on the much bigger revolution--the move to the cloud over the next two decades.
Google is building a competing ecosystem from the ground up with similar characteristics and a desire to attract millions of developers. Amazon is pushing its elastic computer cloud, and Rackspace, EMC, IBM, and many other companies are trying to get a piece of the action. Most the cloud companies are focused on hosting services, but the biggest piece will be platforms-as-a-service with developers creating and running their applications for on a cloud operating system.
An early example of this trend is Salesforce.com's proprietary Force.com platform. Sun Microsystems, the company that coined the phrase "The network is the computer," has all the pieces to construct a planetary cloud but seems to be missing from the discussion. As my friend Steve Gillmor notes, Sun is on the ropes.
Openness is a major issue as the global cloud materializes. Businesses don't want to be locked into a particular cloud, and also want various clouds and services to interoperate via standards. Speaking at the Professional Developers Conference last week, Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie said that the foundation level in the operating system cloud would run in Microsoft's data center, but SQL services, .NET, and Live services can be mixed and matched by developers inside and outside of the company's datacenters. The Azure cloud is also cross-platform, but the various clouds will extract a toll and by nature it won't be dead simple to move applications using foundation services from one cloud to another.
Microsoft's cloud computing efforts have gotten off to a slow start compared with competitors, and it's on the scale of a Manhattan Project for Windows. Azure is in pre-beta and who knows how it will turn out or whether consumers and companies will adopt it with enough volume to keep Microsoft's business model and market share intact. But there is no turning back and Microsoft has finally legitimized Office in the cloud.
Ray Ozzie has a track record of slowly but surely getting things done and Microsoft is famously persistent and cash rich. But building a platform, or Internet operating system, at planetary scale supporting billions of users and trillions of transactions per day, and having fleet Google as a primary competitor will be a major test of Microsoft's brain trust and resolve. Don't be surprised to find a recharged Bill Gates parachuting into the fray as Azure evolves and the cloud war for developers escalates.
See also:
Scoble: Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to turn a corner
The proverbial wheels are coming off. The financial crisis is spreading across the globe. The political mudslinging is getting into full gear as the U.S. presidential election nears its conclusion and inflation continues to rise. Basically, everything costs more, with the exception of gasoline spurred by slowing demand as consumers look for ways to stay afloat financially.
The well-heeled country of Iceland, with 320,000 residents (about half the population of Alaska in an island the size of Kentucky) is nearly underwater financially. Europe, not just the U.S., is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis.
Governments, via taxpayer funds, are stepping into the breach with the equivalent of Band-Aids and bailing wire to stop the potential slide into financial oblivion. But there is no escape from this perfect storm. The financial institutions played fast and loose and now they can't cover their bets. (See the 60 Minutes segment in which the credit crunch is explained in plain English.)
For the tech industry it means hunkering down. A few days ago, the legendary Bill Gates said that companies will continue to invest while the economy sputters somewhat, but "nothing like a big recession or a depression."
His remarks seem overly optimistic, given the crisis of confidence in financial markets spreading like a virus throughout the world. A hacker or terrorist hoping to destabilize economies couldn't have done a better job than the financial industry itself.
Already a steady stream of companies are lowering their forecasts, taking out any surprises as the typically more lucrative fourth quarter gets under way. The stock prices of the top tech companies are in the tank, which is indicative of a very spooked investor community. The investment community looks at those prices and sees a buy order--the stocks are really cheap--but after the last few days it's difficult to have any confidence that a seemingly good bet would pay off.
In the midst and aftermath of this perfect storm, brewed out of years of habit and taken down by mortgages for the masses, both consumers and businesses will be far more conservative in their spending habits in the coming months. As in other epochs, such as the tech meltdown at the end of the 20th century, only the strong will survive. Consolidation or extinction will be the exit strategy, reaching way beyond the broken banking industry, which has been whittled down to a handful of players.
Out of this perfect storm new financial infrastructure and regulations will emerge that bring back confidence into the markets and reignite innovation, that is until the next destructive cycle driven by irrational exuberance comes around.
Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates appeared on the NBC Nightly News Wednesday speaking with Tom Brokaw about the current economic crisis. Gates wasn't concerned about the state of the U.S. economy in the long run. Historical data would support his longer-term view, but that won't make the current disarray and uncertainty about the economy any less scary for investors riding the daily, nausea-inducing roller coaster.
Brokaw observed that Gates seemed to be cool, or not terribly worried, about the U.S. financial crisis. "The U.S. economy in the long run is going to do very, very well. There are some interesting and meaningful decisions to be made in the next weeks," Gates said. He didn't get into the details about those decisions facing Congress, but legislators and the business community are likely seeking his advice. His good friend Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway is investing around $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, providing a confidence boost to the market.
As for continued technology innovation in light of the economic upheaval, Gates said, "In terms of inventing new medicines or improving software, or new ways of doing things, the level of investment will stay very high." That said, conservation of capital will be in the minds of VCs and start-ups until the economy rights itself.
Earlier in the day, Gates told Bloomberg that problems with the U.S. economy would likely reduce government support for combating the world's problems, such as poverty and disease. "There are the rich-world economies and the developing-world economies and, while the degree to which they are linked is not well understood, when one suffers it can't be good for the other. Rich-world budgets may not have room for increased generosity.''
Today is Bill Gates' last day in the office as a regular employee of the company he co-founded in 1975. But as non-executive chairman and someone who is deeply married to Microsoft, Gates is not disappearing from the company.
Chairman Bill Gates
(Credit: Dan Farber)The transition has been well orchestrated, and he will still spend about 20 percent of his time working on Microsoft issues, such as the next-generation Office, natural interfaces, and search. And, he will still obsess and strategize about how to defeat Google.
Bill Gates field questions from this reporter.
(Credit: Michael Arrington)I have been covering Microsoft and Bill Gates for the last 25 years, and I've had a few memorable run-ins with the him over that time. I remember asking him about upstart programming language Java's write once/run anywhere capability in an interview I did with him in the early 1990s. He sat forward in his chair and said with conviction that Java was a stupid idea. Behind that answer, the hyper-competitive Gates was thinking about how to slay the Java dragon. Several years later Microsoft C# appeared.
And who can forget his duel with David Boies in the U.S. Justice Department vs. Microsoft antitrust case. Gates believed that the government was out to destroy Microsoft, and went on the offensive. To this day, he chafes at being called a "convicted monopolist."
In many ways Gates is very much the same as when I met him a few decades ago. His tenacity, intellectual intensity, passion for technology, and competitiveness have remained intact. Now he will be applying those character traits more fully to eradicating polio, malaria, AIDS, and other diseases at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
I can imagine one of his chief rivals, Steve Jobs, giving him a gold-plated iPhone 3G for his retirement with the inscription: "To Bill Gates: Look who's ahead now. Best of luck, Steve Jobs."
That would like dangling meat in front of a hungry lion. Gates would accept the gift with a wry smile and at the same time think about what it would take to trump the iPhone. Even though Vista didn't leapfrog the Mac OS, and Microsoft has rarely been able to out-innovate Apple, the fire is still burning and Gates will be firing off a flurry of e-mails to Steve Ballmer and others he's left in charge.
Chairman Bill Gates and three top execs: Craig Mundie, Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer
(Credit: Microsoft)In an interview this week, Tom Brokaw of NBC asked Gates if he had an iPod. He responded, "No," and added, "The Zune is a better way to carry your music around." Vintage Bill Gates competitiveness.
(Credit:
NBC)
The planet will be better off with Gates focused on technologies and strategies for saving lives rather than defeating Steve Jobs.
See also:
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the executive exodus at Yahoo, the launch of Firefox 3 and Bill Gates' last days as a full-time Microsoftie. We also talk about the impact of millennials, the younger generation brought up digitally, on the corporate workplace. Will they turn off their Facebook, MySpace, iPod, and Twitter while they crunch numbers for a sales report or resolve configuration problems in a data center?
The witty John Paczkowski has come up with his list of the best quotes from the D6 conference. (See our full coverage here)
Following is a small sample:
"Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete."--Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
You would have loved Windows 1.0, Walt. You would have LOVED it.--Steve Ballmer
(Credit: Dan Farber)"AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Web. We don't get no respect."--Jeff Bewkes, president and CEO, Time Warner
"I didn't leave business school to go bankrupt."--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on his first days at Microsoft
"Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth."--Barry Diller, chairman and CEO, IAC
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the celebrity interviews at the D6 conference, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Unfortunately, I called in from the San Diego airport United Airlines gate area, so you'll hear crying children and the ticker taker coaxing me to get on the plane. Larry gives the lowdown on Dell's earnings and the most recent security issues, patches from Apple, and the Comcast hack.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer reminisced about 28 years of working together and addressed a number of topics, including Vista, Yahoo, Google, Windows 7, and search, in an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D6.
Following are the videos from the Gates-Ballmer interview. Full coverage of D6.
Part I
Part II
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
At a reception prior to the start of the D6 conference, Bill Gates held court among a throng of reporters. He explained some of the specifics of his July 1 "retirement" from daily duties at the company he founded. Gates said he would invert how he spends time today. Instead of spending 80 percent on Microsoft and 20 percent on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he will spend 20 percent of his time on Microsoft issues and the remainder on his foundation work.
Gates, who will remain chairman of Microsoft, said he will spend two to three days at Microsoft, where he will have an office, and two to three times that amount of time writing, thinking and working on a variety of pet projects, including the next generation Microsoft Office, natural interfaces (such voice and handwriting) and search. "I'm very involved in search, the internal development," Gates said. "We will build the world's best search." He didn't say with or without Yahoo, but that has been the Microsoft message.
Brian Lam (Gizmodo) and Ina Fried (CNET) in an informal Q&A with Bill Gates.
(Credit: Dan Farber)Regarding the courtship of Yahoo, Gates said it wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things. "When we bet on the graphical interface, that was way bigger than any acquisition," he said. It took Apple to show Gates and his team the way, however.
During the D6 interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, CEO Steve Ballmer said: "Look, we made a bid for Yahoo. It was out there for three months, and there was difference between bid and ask. We thought we could accelerate our business. We were going to be financially disciplined about it. We walked away. We are talking with them about other ideas, but we are not rebidding on the company. I won't comment on what we are talking about." Microsoft has been in talks with Yahoo about some kind of business deal for just search.
"We have a good team and we are patient," Ballmer said about Microsoft's search efforts. "People in our industry are way too impatient. Great things rarely happen overnight." He then expressed a core component of the Microsoft DNA--tenacity. Microsoft will keep coming and coming, as he likes to say. And Google is the target.
Regarding Ballmer not having him around as much, Gates said: "Steve is a founder just like I am. He came when the company was a rounding error. We have created a completely new company many times together." When Ballmer took over as CEO about 8 years ago, the two had to learn how to work in their different roles. "Steve wasn't used to explaining why he does things as I was, such as why you time out (no longer have confidence in them) on a person. As No. 1 you need to be able to articulate that."
During the interview, Gates said that he has been the junior partner for the last 8 years.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer: Partners for 28 years.
(Credit: Dan Farber)Gates also pointed to Microsoft Fellows and $6 billion annual research budget as a key for Microsoft's future. "I am betting on the quality of Microsoft Research," he said.
Gates also said he would work on education, agriculture, and other initiatives that interest him. He is also involved in a project to map all of Africa, using Microsoft resources as well as contributions from Gates himself and his foundation.
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
