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.
Ray Ozzie has a history of trying to break through software and usability barriers. With Lotus Notes, he and his team spent years creating the underlying client/server collaboration technology to enable synchronization, or replication of e-mail online and offline.
Ray Ozzie is synchronizing Microsoft's software strategy.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)His second major initiative, Groove Networks, took the synchronization and collaboration concept into the peer-to-peer realm, allowing individual PCs to communicate directly with one another.
Groove Networks was sold to Microsoft in March 2005, and Ozzie began his next major iteration on a much bigger stage, as Microsoft's chief software architect.
Ozzie teased the next evolution of his decades-long exploration of synchronization and collaboration, which he referred to as a "seamless mesh"--or what I'll call "syncromesh"--in his Mix '08 keynote in Las Vegas:Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.
After client/server and peer-to-peer comes the services cloud, small pieces loosely joined in a "mesh."
Microsoft officials aren't saying much about the mesh other than, "Stay tuned." As noted in this post, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch discovered that Microsoft owns the mesh.com URL, but there is no site as yet.
From what I can gather, Ozzie and team are working on the plumbing required to create a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub.
Ultimately, the "mesh" requires an overhaul of the back end to support utility computing on a grand scale. In addition, applications need to be "refactored," Ozzie said in his keynote. He didn't fully explain the notion of refactoring, but applications need to have a common user interface across different devices and to leverage the unique capabilities of each form factor. In addition, development tools needs to be "refactored" to support the broad variety of usage scenarios and devices without having to rewrite lots of code or use different tools for each target device.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
At the core of the mesh are data synchronization and sharing engines. With the Web and cloud computing becoming more pervasive, users want to be able to access their data from any device, and for the data to be up-to-date, secure and without duplicate content. That requires an standard synchronization infrastructure between services and applications no matter where they originate.
Ozzie conceived of Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) in 2005 as the foundation for a decentralized data bus that synchronizes any feed to any device or platform. It has morphed into FeedSynch, a Windows Live service that enables data sharing via RSS and Atom feeds.
FeedSynch is part of Microsoft's Sync Framework, which allows the following capabilities according to Microsoft's documentation.
Add sync support to new and existing applications, services, and devices
Enable collaboration and offline capabilities for any application
Roam and share information from any data store, over any protocol, and over any network configuration
Leverage sync capabilities exposed in Microsoft technologies to create sync ecosystems
Extend the architecture to support custom data types including files
(Credit:
Roy Williams/Caltech)
The "seamless mesh" concept is part of Microsoft's next-generation software platform. Of course, Microsoft cannot abandon it's lucrative client/server software franchises, such as Office or Windows Vista, but Ozzie is taking a practical and measured approach to building bridges that span the client-server and services worlds. Synchronization is a key for working online as well as online in the loosely coupled, collaborative Web.
With Silverlight, the XAML markup language, and multi-programming language support, Microsoft has a cross-platform development environment for creating rich Internet applications. Add in synchronization plumbed from the cloud that invisibly manages devices, applications, and services, whether online or offline, and the mesh starts to make sense.
One question for the future is whether Microsoft will make this synchronization layer for the Web--a kind of worldwide mesh--truly open, or whether it will find ways to bind it a little more closely to its own Live environment. I'm betting that Ozzie's Microsoft takes the open road.
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