Ozzie puts his own spin on 'ThinkWeek'

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was known for his twice-yearly endeavors known as "ThinkWeeks," intensive retreats where he pored over technical papers written by his employees.

Ray Ozzie, who succeeded Gates as Microsoft's chief software architect, says he would rather "dream" than "think."

Once or twice a year, Ozzie tries to find time for what he calls "white space." Rather than be surrounded by the ideas of others, Ozzie prefers to lock himself away with the proverbial blank sheet of paper. His most recent such exercise was during a brief trip to Hawaii in April following a work trip to Asia.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News)

It's a practice that dates back to Ozzie's time at Groove Networks and even before that. Inevitably, Ozzie returns to the office with a ton of new ideas, sending a variety of "go do" tasks for his team.

"It's clear he's gone away and been thinking," said one person who has been on the receiving end of Ozzie's lengthy post-"white space" memos.

That's not to say ThinkWeek is going away under the Ozzie regime. It just won't be Ozzie doing all the reading of papers. In the last couple of years, Gates began expanding the effort, enlisting a group of the company's most senior technical leaders to comment on ideas.

Rather than have a ThinkWeek, those who are reading the papers are encouraged to dedicate "ThinkDays" where they reflect and comment on such papers.

Another practice put in place before Gates left was the notion of Quests, which was first reported by CNET News in 2006. Microsoft launched the effort, CEO Steve Ballmer said, as part of a movement to further distribute technical-planning work to more people as Gates prepared to step away from full-time work. Gates officially switched over to part-time work at the end of last month.

While ThinkWeek offered a chance for people throughout the company to lay out ideas that may or may not be within their daily business areas, Quests began as an effort to encourage more systematic visionary planning within business groups. People lay out their most inspired vision for where things could be in, say, 10 years' time, beyond the typical product release horizon.

Some 70 such Quests are now in place, within six broad areas, such as the future of information work and the future of the home. Microsoft has added an in-person component to the effort, Ozzie said, with a yearly Quests Summit, in which company leaders meet in different rooms at the same conference center to see what others are up to in their Quests.

"It gives a guy in SQL (Server) a chance to hear where Xbox is going," Ozzie said. "It's a great mixer."

Getting people from across the company to collaborate is key to Ozzie's work. Much of his vision depends on both business leaders and engineers from throughout Microsoft being able to see beyond the organizational chart, and develop products and services that link together what have traditionally been disparate pursuits.

[RealGuy2008]

I don't understand why people keep interviewing Ray Ozzie on this topic and continue to get the facts wrong. David Vaskevitch, Microsoft's CTO, is the one who created "quests". It was in 2002/2003 when he had the idea and started on a path of creating these "visions" for Microsoft. David's organization continues to drive the quest mission. It is DavidV's Quests, not Ray.

Ina, you should go and ask DavidV for an interview. I bet he would gladly give you one and actually set the record straight on why he created Quests, where they are and how the company is using them to map out their product roadmaps.

[MicrosoftInsider]

I've been involved with Quests as a PM for nearly three years. Bill Gates asked David Vaskevitch to design a process that would result in a long term technical strategy for the company, as part of his planning for Bill's retirement. The original versions of the Quests were very top-down, from David and Bill, but the process, as it developed, caused a cultural shift, and the Quests now are the products of specific technical leaders across the company who work collaboratively with their teams and peers to design strategies and architectures that will tackle problems that may take more than one product cycle to solve. David Vaskevitch's team (under Ray Ozzie) still manages the Quests process, but the Quests themselves are created and owned by the technical experts across the company. The process enables Microsoft to take better advantage of the strong technical leaders we've hired over the past years.

I don't see anything inaccurate in this article. From an insider's view, the sheer scale of the cultural shift (strategy no longer coming top-down from one guy alone) and the success of the collaboration the technical leaders have been doing is really amazing - I strongly believe Microsoft is on track to solve the problems caused by product groups not necessarily going in the same directions and not necessarily even knowing what the other ones are doing.

[alegr]

Let me tell you my story. I usually assemble my computers from components. This time I bit the bullet and bought an expensive HP all-in-one with a touch screen, for my wife. It had Vista Pro Premium. Man, let me tell you: UAC is so fscking annoying. I wanted to use proper security model: a separate Administrator account and several Limited User accounts. First, because of someone's infinite wisdom, Administrator account is disabled in that Vista SKU. 'control userpasswords2' then "Advanced" doesn't work, because some "smart" guy decided that these capabilities are too smart for stupid home users. OK, I had Vista Ultimate licence from my MSDN set, so I did the ugrade. Now, hibernation is nowhere to be found. Folks, if it's disabled because of some misbehaving driver, why don't you tell the user: "the driver for device xxxx of vendor yyyy may cause system instability if hibernation is used, continue?". Then the vendor yyyy will have an incentive to fix it. Fortunately, command 'powercfg -h e' does its majjig. Then, issue of "switch user" vs "lock desktop". In XP, Win+L with Fast User Switching took me to the user list, which makes PERFECT sense. In Vista, Win+L takes you to "locked" screen, then you have to press "Switch User". Then because some moron at MS doesn't understand that it's not necessary to completely reinitialize your video card if you just switch to a different session, it will go through blank screen. And fscking Nvidia driver takes like 5 seconds to do that. ***? Now let's start on wireless networking. Because of retarded QA at MS, XP SP3 is unable to share files with Vista SP1, without a hotfix. Though even with a hotfix, I had no luck either. Now I want to establish Ad Hoc network. Unfortunately, there is no way to make Vista connect automatically to ad hoc net, after the keys are configured. You MUST click Connect. What's that, dialup in 1998? When one does a logout or shutdown, the windows go berserk. How about disabling all animations, and stop switching back and forth to logout screen? OK. Help system is so fscking unusable, just like Lotus Notes, which doesn't surprise me now that Mr Ozzie is here. It gives you links to so remotely relevant "how to" pages about trivial actions, and doesn't have any "what is that all about" pages to understand. Of course, users need to hold their hands and are unable to understand concepts, so why confuse them? They are idiots, take it. Let's gather to 1% on the bottom of the intellect pool, screw the rest of those eggheads.

But why care? Mr Chief Architecture Astronaut Ray Ozzie more concerned about next greates thing, AKA FILE SYNCHRONIZATION. Screw useability.

[AppleSuxLeo]

I bet you NEVER got any malware at all with Vista. IE7 under Vista runs "sandboxed" and is arguably the safest way to surf.

[alegr]

I've never got malware under Win2K and XP either. Because I have separate Administrators and users accounts.