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

Software subscriptions

[PurifyYourMind]

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.

Running to a close? For now, but for how long?

[r_jensen11]

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.

What services, though?

[HalAtWork]

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?

Linux usability.

[headkase]

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! ;)

Re:You must be new here.

[Ravenscall]

Well, if you have been around as long as you claim you would know:

The trolls used to be much worse
General conversation is much better
People have ALWAYS bitched about how much /. has sucked, and
You are just a troll now because things evolve and you do not.