Former Microsoft Exec Ray Ozzie Named To HP Board

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that HP has named former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie to its Board of Directors. Ozzie, known for his early work on collaboration technologies including Lotus Notes, has been working on his own startup since leaving Microsoft in 2010. Ozzie recently sounded off on the NSA spygate affair, suggesting it's time to revisit the deal we made with the 9/11-privacy-devil."

Comments

Re:There goes HP

[Endo13]

I'm not sure what a Scottish minister or South African soldier has to do with any of this.

Perhaps you meant William Hewlett?

Re:Someone actually claims Lotus Notes???

[rudy_wayne]

Anyone who has had to suffer through that abomination that is called Lotus Notes would probably be quite willing to gather a mob, light the torches, arm themselves with pitchforks, and chase the poor sod who created this travesty to the closest windmill and set it alight.

Frustrated from being forced to use Notes for 3 years... definitely.

3 years? HA!!! I've been using Lotus Notes since 1999. Hopefully I never meet Ray Ozzie because I don't know if I would be able to restrain myself from doing something terrible.

Overall, however, this recent appointment is meaningless. HP is adding 3 additional members to their board of directors, i.e., 3 more people getting paid $200k a year to attend a couple of meetings and do nothing.

The former CEO of McDonald's
The former CEO of Liberty Media (distributor of TV programming such as QVC and the Disney Channel)
And the creator of one of the shittiest pieces of software ever.

That should really be a tremendous help for a company whose main products are PCs, Servers and Printers.

Re:Someone actually claims Lotus Notes???

[snadrus]

As someone who repaired Lotus Notes for 5 years & actually looked at Ray's code comments, I can say it's quite the failure vs today's replacements. But in the '80s when Ray made it, it:
- was one of the few cross-platform, supported mail servers.
- worked with more languages than any program: Unicode was based on its LMBCS format.
- openly-documented its data formats.
- has many extension APIs and ways including a BASIC clone (the common language of the time).
- could send signed messages between companies & be spam-free.
- has a 'big data' storage design (replicate-able document store) used today (but built poorly).
- was many servers in 1 install (back when that was the goal).
- still has a 15x faster mail router than Outlook (that one's new).

So it's lousy now because it was ahead of its time then (and couldn't change when the world went another direction). We could be so lucky to get a new product with as many ideas ahead of their time as came from Lotus Notes in the '80s.