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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."
I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work. Corporations and other large orgs already pay Microsoft yearly fees to be able to get guaranteed updates at a fixed price. My university paid $250,000 per year to get unlimited seats for Office and the OS. However, the one thing that could undue this is the very long delays for things like Vista. If Microsoft went to an Ubuntu-type model where they promised updates every six months, I could see it working.
If ISP's have their way, plans like these could seriously backfire. Especially if the ISP's begin to be more strict on how much people are exceeding bandwidth quotas. Yes, I know that right now quotas are not that common; however, for the likes of the people on my network, we are only allowed 5GB of data, from a combined upload and download, per any given 7 consecutive days. Needless to say, if I turn on and off my computer daily (and we'll keep it simple at once a day,) and I have to download Word, Excel, and Outlook every day, that doesn't leave me with much more data remaining for activites such as watching internet video streams or listening to audio over the internet at a decent bitrate, both of which are applications that many analysts say are likely to boom in the coming years (however, I tend to view this to actually boom once DN:F comes out, but I actually do like to listen to some radio stations from across the world, such as Minnesota Public Radio's The Current.)
The only way we could have applications be truly web-based is if ISP's don't impose quotas, or those quotas are set at such a high level that they are meaningless.
Not only that, but given that your customers would also have to subscribe to MS's software services, what developer in their right mind would use such services as dependencies for their software? If MS moves the bulk of their software online, they will want developer tie-ins to such software. Or, will MS simply switch from selling IIS to providing hosting services with APIs and daemons that developers and end-users won't be able to run themselves, and that competitors won't provide? It seems far-fetched and not even beneficial for Microsoft.
A more far-fetched idea is that they might just do a total end-run around developers and provide complete solutions for businesses and even take on administration duties as well... but is that even realistic? Sounds like a nightmare for MS. Maybe developers on MS platforms will be reduced to middle-men in this situation?
Twinstiq, game news
Yup, totally agree with you.
I read this:
"but the desktop era is drawing to a close"
And I thought: I doubt it. If anything, increasing security issues on the big intarweb will make people want more local apps and data storage, not less.
I think the build-a-big-shitty-OS era is drawing to a close. That I'll agree with.
But how else is Microsoft going to get you accept paying more money every month for software they already have? It's a big problem in the software industry!
Think about it this way: the pre-release backlash on Vista has indicated that people might not be willing to pay $200 every couple of years for upgrades, no matter how many glass-effects those upgrades might have. Therefore, the only way to get people to pay money for software anymore is to make sure that your old software stops working when you stop paying. The only alternative would be that Microsoft goes out of business, which would be disastrous for everyone's economy. Did you see the report on how much Vista is going to benefit the EU economy?
I rest my case.
The better way to phrase it would be "the days of desktop being the preeminent focus and source of profit are coming to an end." Similar to the 60's were the heyday of the mainframe. Does IBM still make tons of money on their mainframe business? Hell yes. Are they considered a mainframe company? No - IBM is a "services" company.
The reality is that there are few apps most non-power users care about - and those apps include browser, email, word and Excel. All of those could be delivered virtually. I find this ironic - because in the late '80's and early '90's SUN was pushing their terminals where you had a central server running the software and many terminals.
Is the desktop going away? No. But the explosive growth - and the profit - seems to be in a distributed model. Whoever gets it right first (Google building on their GMail and other initiatives? Salesforce.com? MicroSoft?...) will be able to set the standards for the future of the corporate and personal user. MicroSoft will continue to make money on OS and on their office suite, just as IBM continues to sell mainframes (and quite profitably, thank you), but the noise will be about virtual apps.
from the change-or-die dept.
;)
I'm not trolling here, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
This is just a bit of constructive criticism. Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Shh.
Author's Note: In reviewing my post before submitting, I see that it's a bit of a brainstorming, but I like the way the thoughts developed. I think it fairly accurately illustrates what web-based "services" really are compared to other products and services. Please bear with the thought-development process.
True - but I would consider your example of hiring someone to plow your field the same as hiring someone to use software - bascially for their services to use the software. That's different than buying a tractor and hiring someone to drive it even.
I think what I'm trying to say is that it appears that the idea is an odd form of leasing; with leasing, say, a tractor, I pay installments for the use of the tractor. However, as long as I have posession of the tractor I can use it. The software model is more like "Hey, you have this tractor sitting on your lot, and you stopped paying for it but I'm not going to come pick it up ever, but don't use it while it's still there!" when it comes to the typical service agreements.
There was a post elsewhere regarding World of Warcraft - the online game is different, because you're not paying for the 'game' - it's more like cable or a bus pass where you are paying for access - another example might be tickets for an amusement park. The park exists, and you can get there, but if you don't have a ticket you cannot participate. The online game is a different beast again, and I think the amusement park is the closest analogy rather than thinking of "product" (i.e., tractor) or "service" (i.e., write software, plow the field, cut your hair).
Note that "subscription" models like newspapers are also different: With a newspaper subscription - a traditional one that is - you are paying for tangible goods to be delivered to your location periodically. Once you stop the subscription, you still have all the old material that was delivered to your location. This is different than "online" subscriptions which are typically really "access" agreements - if I paid to read news for Oct 5th on a site, and I don't pay tomorrow, I can't go back and see the news for Oct 5th because it is behind access control. But, if I have paid to receive the hard copy of news for the 5th, then I will always have that. Having the hard copy and an agreement that says "You paid for that, but don't go look in your bookshelf for it if you don't pay!" is really kind of foolish.
Hopefully that discussion illustrates the difference between what 'subscription' really means and what 'access-based payments' are and what 'services' and 'products' are. (Note, as a pet peeve, I hate it when organizations like banks call things like a savings account a 'product' - the only thing I could call a product from a bank is a checkbook perhaps. The rest is pure service and access control.)
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Well, if you have been around as long as you claim you would know:
/. has sucked, and
The trolls used to be much worse
General conversation is much better
People have ALWAYS bitched about how much
You are just a troll now because things evolve and you do not.
You say you want a revolution....
Yes, it was. That's the year I built my current home PC (a Micron Millenia Pro2 Plus tower with a fancy new 200MHz Pentium Pro processor [686 babee!], an Adaptec 2940U, a Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 with add-on wavetable card [effectively an AWE32], an Intel EtherExpress Pro/100B NIC, and some stupid video card since forgotten (replaced immediately with a 4MB Matrox MGA Millenium)).
:-) I've applied one FixPak since then (FixPak 15, required for Mozilla), but otherwise the installation is the same one I've had since day one.
:-)
Over the years I've added some additional SCSI drives, a CD burner, a 12MB Voodoo2 card, and various other things, but the core system is still the same system I've had since November 1996. It's been on 24x7 since that time, and I still use it every single day.
1996 is also the year that two of my main home operating systems came out.
Windows 95 OSR2 (otherwise known as Windows 95B, the first version of Windows with FAT32 and the last without the crappy MSIE integration on the desktop) came out in the summer of 1996, and I've used it on the above box for playing various games ever since. Folks here might laugh, but I still get a kick out of games like NFS3 and NFS4, the original Unreal Tournament, Tribes 1, Madden 2001, and Total Annihilation, and those all work just fine.
OS/2 Warp 4 came out in the fall of 1996, just in time for me to install on the box and use as my main desktop OS for the next ten years. Literally.
Some people say I still live in 1996. Nonsense! I'm a modern PC hobbyist -- my two remaining Deskpro 6200's were built in *1998*!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.