Ray Ozzie To Step Down From His Role At Microsoft

denobug writes "Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, is stepping down. He is to remain with Microsoft until he retires, focusing his efforts 'in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments,' based on a memo from Steve Ballmer. Also according to Steve's memo, the role of CSA was unique and it will not be filled."

Comments

Re:End of Azure

[Anonymous Coward]

"Software architects" are by far one of the worst things that can happen to a company that develops software products.

Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks" that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense. Yet somehow these frameworks end up being hugely complex piles of shit. The original software products end up being ignored or remain undeveloped, since so many resources went into developing these cock-awful frameworks.

TRANSLATION: Ballmer will resign in 2011

[WillAffleckUW]

For anyone who doesn't speak corporate-speak, or the variant they use at Microsoft, this really means the following:

Ray got fired, but at his level they don't fire you. He got fired because Microsoft is a mature business and doesn't really create anything new anymore.

Ballmer refuses to split the company up (tax reasons) so he's been given a grace period of a year to find a replacement for himself.

Here endeth the lesson.

Re:Huh

[PCM2]

He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything.

You sure about that? According to Wired , Ozzie had everything to do with Azure, and spent his first two years on the job reorganizing the company to produce a services platform for the Web. He's quite clear about his intentions and the direction he was pushing the company in his original memo to Microsoft senior management, which was sent out under Bill Gates's email address. And longtime Microsoft observer Mary-Jo Foley says:

As I discovered during the course of my Red Dog meetings, Ozzie was anything but uninvolved in Red Dog and Azure. In fact, I heard from team members time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.