How Ray Ozzie is Changing Microsoft

prostoalex writes "The October issue of Wired magazine takes a look at Ray Ozzie's work with Microsoft. To hear the article describe it, he's rebuilding the company from the ground up. A 70,000-employee company is quietly changing its ways by thinking of software as deliverable services that perhaps could be rented on a monthly subscription basis." From the article: "There are, of course, two major reasons for Ozzie's ascendancy at Microsoft: Gates and Ballmer. Ozzie is one of the few technologists anywhere whom they respect; they'd been trying for years to get him to join the company. Now he's carrying their hopes for the future, and it's a heavy load. Ozzie needs to move Microsoft from selling software in a box to selling lightning-fast, powerful online applications ranging from gaming to spreadsheets. The risks are enormous. The mission is to radically alter the way the company sells its most profitable software and to pursue the great unknown of so-called Web services - trading an old cash cow for an as-yet-to-be-determined cash cow. No, Microsoft doesn't think its customers will stop using PCs with hard drives and work entirely online, but the desktop era is drawing to a close, and that promises to force some painful trade-offs."

Comments

AAAHHHHH!!!

[hawkbug]

I'm going to puke if I see somebody mention that the desktop days are coming to an end!!!! Who says? What proof, besides companies greed, shows that people don't want desktop software? I sure as hell won't be running apps online rather than on my own machine for a lot reasons. Just to name a few:

1) Bandwidth

2) Keeping apps under MY control, not somebody elses

3) I don't like being required to have an internet connection to type an f'n paper.

And those are just to name a few.

Re:AAAHHHHH!!!

[tpgp]

2) Keeping apps under MY control, not somebody elses

If you want apps under YOUR control, I hope you're not running anything from MS as it is....

Re:AAAHHHHH!!!

[garcia]

*YOU* won't because you aren't their target market. YOU are the exact opposite of their target market. They want users that are uninformed, not computer literate, and have no desire to maintain a computer.

These people are cash cows for businesses. They get them to buy/rent the software, they are able to convince them that they won't have to care for the applications, and they convince them that this is the best way.

These people don't know what bandwidth is, they are people that don't want to control anything, and they don't think about things like requiring an Internet connection to do their tasks. As long as everything works they're thrilled to fork the money over monthly, just like they do for electric, gas, water, telephone, and their cable TV.

Service?

[Digital Vomit]

Software as a service? Perpetual payments? No thanks.

Who -- besides companies looking for more profits and a constant revenue stream -- actually wants this? The cons far, far outweight the pros for the typical customer.

Tales of Desktop's Death Greatly Exaggerated

[fractalus]

Okay, set aside for a moment that it's Microsoft here. Think for a second.

Web applications are not new. I've built my fair share of them. (Maybe even more than my fair share.) In some circumstances, they work very well:

• application can be accessed for anywhere with net access
• application can be updated instantly
• easy to share data between users
• customer relieved of burden of maintaining servers and data storage

They have downsides, too:

• application requires a functional web browser; browser bugs may impact web application
• application provider might go out of business, taking your data with them
• pay-as-you-go
• centralized data repository is an attractive target for hackers

And yet for many applications, particularly specialized applications dealing with customer account access, inventory management, project management, online publishing, or a whole slew of other things, we accept these limitations. We assess the costs of not using a web application and determine that, overall, the web application provides value for the money.

What's interesting here is that while existing web applications have enough benefits to outweigh the risks, it's not clear that replacing standard desktop apps will come out the same in the risk/benefit analysis. The kinds of things we're doing on the web, we're doing because they work better that way; we've had years of experience with the desktop, and we know some things work better with centralized server models, and others work better with all the work done on the client. Microsoft is betting the farm on everyone being happy to push to the server model, but it won't happen; there are too many compelling reasons to keep ordinary desktop apps right where they are, on your desktop.

What they're afraid of is losing the fight for the desktop. This is their long-term strategy to lock everyone into their system. First they tried to lock up the OS. Then they tried to lock up the file formats. While Linux and OpenOffice are not quite credible threats (if you consider market share only) MS can look ahead and see a day when they have enough market share to seriously threaten their dominance on the desktop, and it isn't 50%, or even 25%. Maybe it's 20%, that magic point where people feel like there is an alternative, and then it's the tipping point, people no longer feel locked in. So MS wants to keep people locked in, because it keeps the cash flowing. That means locking up the data itself. And that's what their online apps are all about.