Slashdot Mirror
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'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.
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.
MS has been making it increasingly plain, at a very high volume and in no uncertain terms, that this model is precisely what they are aiming toward.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
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.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
MS investing a lot of time and research/development into online-ready "mini-apps" does not necessitate a trade off in the quality or time spent developing their desktop OSes.
Look at the Xbox. Microsoft is a big enough of a company that it can afford to branch off into another market and create a whole new division dedicated to new services/products without the other aspects of their business suffering (not any more than usualy, anyway).
Although we may be talking about a change in company culture as well - which most definitely does change a company from the ground up - expandinding into new fields and with new products and service offerings doesn't mean that we should expect an entirely Microsoft that completely departs from it's desktop offerings.
Not to mention that I don't see too many businesses that currently use desktops in their office switching things over to cell phones in the near future.
-TheBaron2
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
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:
They have downsides, too:
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.
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
Frankly, they shouldn't keep running their mouth about these big grand ideas if they're never gonna actually follow through. Sure, they released .NET and have done small parts of what they said they'd do, but so far nothing has come close to completely changing the company the way they keep claiming.
the folks that read /. aren't going to give up their desktop OSs and apps anytime soon, but many (most) home users would be fine with IM, email, photo, word processing and so on being run off some server in Borat's broom closet especially if this meant no updating/malware/backups or other maintanence, a lot of these folks would see $10 to $20 a month (added to the cable bill) for all of this a bargain
I don't know about you personally, but if the typical /.er is anything to go by, they make a big stink and next thing you know, they are back to their DRM-infested goodies. At least the general public has computer illiteracy as an excuse.
What is DRM/TC if not forcing a desktop into more controlled states, i.e., officially-sanctioned consumption devices? Time to puke, dude.
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.
Ohhh...I don't know about that. I've got Clippy up to a level 60 wizard now!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Hmm, lets do some quick math: .12 x 9 hours in a corporate workday (Allowing for lunch)= 1.08
* 45,000 workers in a large services company = $48,600.
Tell me who would buy it with that kind of tax per day.
You say you want a revolution....
New York Times, June 23, 2000, John Markoff:
...The strategy will involve repackaging some of the company's core products, like its Office software, as subscription-based services obtained over the Internet."
... But while he and Mr. Gates insisted that those services would be based on an open Internet standard, enabling users with non-Windows-based platforms like the Palm computer and Apple Computer's Macintosh to take advantage of them, the executives acknowledged that such users would be second-class citizens. Mr. Gates said the "richest" interactions with the new .NET services would require the new Windows.NET operating system."
.NET was equivalent to the 100 percent bet the company placed on its shift to the Internet strategy in 1995. Mr. Ballmer said he was confident, but he realized that the strategy was still a gamble. 'It's a bet I feel very confident about,' he said. 'But it's a bet.'"
"The company said it would retool its product line to shift the very focus of computing away from hardware devices and toward a new generation of Internet-based software allowing people to interact with data and one another whether they are using computers, digital cell phones or interactive televisions. William H. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, portrayed the long-awaited move as 'more ambitious than anything we've done' adding, 'There is no Microsoft product that isn't touched by this activity....'
"Microsoft's new view of computing calls for processing to be done everywhere,
"Mr. Gates said that the bet on
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They could use the cell phone/cable company business model for payment. 2-3 year agreements at a certain cost, and monthly there after. If you break said agreement, you owe them the full fee, etc... It's a model that's tested and works (except for the customer).
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The problem there is when you start charging people for what used to be free (and most people will tell you Windows is, in fact free. After all, it comes with the computer!) and people will drop it like a hot potato.
You say you want a revolution....
Id's under 10k have some cred, for longevity reasons if nothing else.
*10* **k** ?????
Them youngsters??
Have you read my journal today?
All a low ID means is that some of us didn't have a life before you folks didn't have a life. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
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.
I will never fall to that model of distribution. It was tried years ago and it is a pathetic idea. Anyone falling for it is stupid. You buy a product and you are entitled to use it till the end of time. You never want to keep paying for software over a long period of time even if you think you are getting a deal because in the long run you pay exceptionally more and you get nothing for it in the end.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.