Outside the Lines

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.

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.

Bill Gates will step away from the day-to-day activities at Microsoft in about a month to focus his estimable intellect and energy on his nonprofit work, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He will remain chairman of the company.

As the figurehead, spiritual leader and most forceful personality at the company he founded in 1975, Gates will be missed in some of the daily skirmishes and debates over technology issues and how Microsoft wages its battles with Google, Apple, Oracle, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the European Union. But, Gates gave up the CEO title to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and his chief software architect title to Ray Ozzie in June 2006.

In her new book, Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era, Mary Jo Foley wrote that "a Gates-less Microsoft is going to be a directionless Microsoft--at least for the near term. The existing set of to managers is too mired in old thinking and old ways to turn the Redmond ship quickly."

I asked Mary Jo if she thought Gates was able to inject his way of thinking about software and business within the Microsoft DNA. "I don't think anyone thinks like Gates at Microsoft. Jeff Raikes was the most like him, in the way he could look ahead for what's coming in technology and put it in a way that everybody could understand it, but he is retiring this fall," she said.

She goes on to say that without Gates leading the charge and with too many MBAs in leadership positions, Microsoft cannot be successful in the next decade of its existence:

"If Microsoft were still the company it was 10 or 20 years ago, with the simultaneously ruthless and cautious Gates at the helm, I'd have no qualms predicting that the Redmond vendor will be successful in its next decade-plus transition. But can a company that is becoming more and more MBA-heavy (not to mention employee heavy, with a workforce approaching 100,000 when/if the Yahoos are added) be guaranteed of continued success in an ever more technology-driven, nimble and Web-centric world. In a word, no.

I think that the "ruthless" and "cautious" Gates she describes (I would say "intense" and "relentless" for the graying Bill Gates) has prepared the way for a succession that won't adversely affect the company. Ballmer already knows how Gates thinks and has his ear. They have been working side-by-side for over 30 years. It wasn't only Ballmer who missed the Internet the first time around.

Gates has spent time with Ozzie and hundreds of other top managers over the years, and they must be clued into his work ethic and way of thinking. They have been to the Bill Gates school of software development, envisioning and business management. That doesn't mean they start rocking in their chairs as Gates does or they sprinkle the word "super" in their orations. Ozzie has a more genial style than Gates, but there is more than one way to communicate a software architecture vision.

No one can replace Gates--that is not the point. Microsoft is in several businesses and generates more than $50 billion in revenue and a very healthy profit. The company is fighting battles on a lot of fronts, especially with Google, which could generate nearly half the revenue Microsoft does just selling search ads. That's not something Gates has been able to fix during the last few years.

What Gates brought to Microsoft was a focus, intellect, and tenaciousness that propelled the company forward. It was a culture that thrived on having the smartest kids on the block, who had all the confidence in the world, and enjoyed vanquishing established giants like IBM. Now Microsoft is the giant and Google has many of the smartest kids on the block and supreme confidence, sometimes interpreted as arrogance.

As chairman, Gates is not going away. If a crisis arises, he will be in the middle of it. Gates could also pull a Michael Dell, who handed the reigns of his company over to Kevin Rollins, but retook the CEO job when the company's performance faltered three years later.

But the challenge for Microsoft isn't filling Gates' role in the company or that Microsoft will be directionless without Gates, but in getting the smartest kids on the block to come and build products for 16 hours a day. This is where Mary Jo gets it right. Microsoft needs to attract the best and brightest. That requires an inspired leader who the troops believe can take them to the promised land. It remains to be seen if the software+services vision led by Gates and carried on by Ozzie and his team will be innovative enough to attract the talent and technical brilliance needed for the next decade of Microsoft.

Below is an interview I did with Mary Jo about the her views on Microsoft's future:

TV Show hosted by Ustream

Microsoft pushed out a tech preview of its Live Mesh service, but is still holding back on delivering a more complete set of Office applications delivered from the cloud.

At this point, Microsoft has delivered Dynamics CRM as an on-demand, multitenant hosted service as well as hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint. Tim O'Brien, senior director of platform strategy for Microsoft, said this week, "We have a huge portfolio of applications that we'll over time take in this direction," meaning that Microsoft is rearchitecting much of its software for multitenancy to run in its growing number of data centers. Multitenancy allows software to be delivered from the cloud with great efficiency, running multiple customers off the same instance.

Ray Ozzie's memo detailing Microsoft's vision for a future, with the Web rather than the PC at the center, didn't shed any new light on Office for the cloud. Microsoft is focusing on its software+services model, creating services--such as Excel Data Services, SQL Server Data Services and BizTalk Services--that fuse the Web and client software.

In the memo, Ozzie stated:

Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each - the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of "personal productivity" into the realm of the "inter-personal" through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.

Ozzie is telegraphing that Microsoft will continue to add services, such as integrating a social layer into Live Mesh, but for now Office Live consists of Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business. Office Live Workspace works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, allowing users to open and save files and access them from any computer via the browser. It also synchronizes lists, such as contacts and tasks, with Outlook. The Small Business version is for setting up and managing e-commerce-oriented Web sites.

Microsoft also has Windows Live services, such as Hotmail, SkyDrive, Spaces and Writer, but nothing approaching the Office (or Microsoft Works) suite or Google Apps or Zoho.

In the past Microsoft executives have said customers aren't asking for a cloud-based Office suite. Recent shifts in the market, such as Salesforce.com integrating Google Apps may alter that view sooner than later.

For now, Microsoft appears to be sticking to its view that downloadable client software is a long way from extinction. I wouldn't argue that point, but that shouldn't prevent Microsoft from also providing a collaborative, cloud-based version of Office applications for those who prefer that mode of operation. It doesn't violate the software+services mantra. It just leans more into the cloud, which is what Microsoft is doing. Let users have it the way they want it. Of course, things like messing with the super-lucrative desktop Office business may not be in the best interest of Microsoft's shareholders in the short term, but that is a slippery slope given where software is heading.

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.

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.

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.

Following a most amazing pre-keynote performance by Vince Mira, a 15-year-old with the voice of Johnny Cash without the gravel, Microsoft Chief Software Architect took the stage to update the software and services strategy, in the context of content, commerce and community, for company.

As News.com's Ina Fried chronicled in her play-by-play of the keynote, Ozzie offered carefully orchestrated nod to the bid for Yahoo. "I can say its [Yahoo] already added some interesting twists to what promises to be a really, really exciting year," he said.

He noted the huge growth coming in search and advertising (which Yahoo can help Microsoft could intercept) and reference the talented engineering resources that Yahoo would bring to Microsoft.

After getting the Yahoo question out of the way, he outlined the various initiatives across Microsoft to embrace the cloud via connected devices, entertainment, productivity, business and development. He didn't add much to what has already been said about Microsoft's quest to embrace and extend the cloud with its technologies as well as the standard protocols that enable the Web to be useful.

Ozzie did hint at a technology that will create a seamless mesh out of PCs and connected services via the Web. Ozzie said:

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 now, 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.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch found that Microsoft owns the Mesh.com URL, and it leads to a Windows Live ID sign-in page for a site that isn't Live.

In the world of cloud and utility computing applications and the back end will need to be "refactored." for this new world. Apps will take advantage of the unique strengths of each device. New front end development skills will be required, Ozzie says, along with back-end technologies.

In closing he told the crowd of developers, "I'd like you to bet on us, and on the power of Internet and the magic of software across a world of devices." In other words, join the Silverlight, XAML revolution and become part of the Microsoft cloud.

Coming up this week, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will make one of his rare public appearances to give developers the latest word on the future of the Web and Microsoft software at the Mix '08 conference in Las Vegas.

Ozzie is heading up Microsoft's effort to embrace the Web as a platform, which started in October 2005, when Bill Gates fired off a memo to his executive staff and distinguished engineers with the following call to action:

"The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves."

More recently, in July 2007, Ozzie touted Microsoft's advantages versus others trying to harness the cloud for applications, namely Google:

"We are the only company with a platform DNA to viably delivery this kind of highly leveraged platform approach to services and we're certainly one of the few companies that has the financial capacity to capitalize on this sea change."

Microsoft is extremely focused on this sea change, but that doesn't mean that the company will unveil a set of Web applications that duplicate the functionality in the Microsoft Office cash cow as a way to compete with upstart Google Apps, as some have predicted.

At the Mix '07 event in April, Ozzie explained the thinking around a cloud-based Office suite:

"[Office Live] will progressively broaden...we have no specific announcements today. In my opening remarks, I laid out a design pattern and you will see it replicated through the offerings we do. You use a PC for what a PC is good for and look at the overall scenario, what is best for the PC and what in services as standalone or in conjunction with a PC or mobile device. In all of our products can use that pattern to extrapolate."

PC client software still plays a crucial role for Microsoft, and accounts for billions in revenue. As example of how Microsoft thinks about services, the company recently refreshed Office Live Workspace, which isn't a Web-based Office but a service that allows users to access, manage and share documents via a browser. Live Workspace does include a rudimentary Web-based word processor, Web Notes.

Last time I checked in with Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's Business Division, he told me that the browser-based application space is extremely important to watch, but that there hasn't been a lot of demand for Microsoft Office in the cloud. That conversation was about a year ago.

What's clear is that Microsoft is taking a measured approach to moving into cloud, cognizant that client/server Office franchise is at stake. On the enterprise software front, Microsoft has deployed a multitenant "Dynamics CRM Live" service for customers.

As CNET News.com reporter Martin LaMonica and ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley reported, Microsoft plans to debut at the Mix conference some new hosted services, frameworks, protocols, and tools, as well as a Windows Live Quick Applications update, including a Windows Live Messenger Library that will let third-party software interoperate with Microsoft's IM network. In addition, Silverlight 2 will be a major highlight at the event.

Stay tuned for Mix coverage this week. Ina Fried and I will be on the scene.