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

There goes HP

[davydagger]

it was nice knowing you HP, but your about to suffer the same fate as Nokia.

don't you people ever learn?

Re:There goes HP

[ColdWetDog]

I really didn''t think HP could drop out any further but to add the guy responsible for Lotus Notes of all things?

I think it''s time to unfreeze David Packard and William Hewitt.

Re:There goes HP

[durdur]

Well, unlike Nokia they are in more than one line of business. But they have been executing poorly for some years and have a history of doing dumb acquisitions, culminating in the disastrous Autonomy deal in 2011. Ray Ozzie can't by himself fix any of that. But arguably he can't be worse than the slate of directors who got them to where they are.

Re:There goes HP

[c]

But arguably he can't be worse than the slate of directors who got them to where they are.

True, unless he convinces them to pull an Elop.

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:There goes HP

[gl4ss]

well he could convince hp to do only windows rt tablets.
that would be almost as fucked up as elop.

nokia is still in some other businesses than windows phones.. like networks(they just bought siemens out of nsn) and s40 phones.. which is still a lot less than what they used to be, but all the other businesses than phones were quite failboats, from tv's to settop boxes...

Re:There goes HP

[steelfood]

This is true. HP "went" ten, fifteen years ago since they hired Carly Fiorina as CEO. You can argue that they imploded from the dot-com bust, but I think their downfall began much, much earlier. They squandered the Compaq acquisition and the Palm acquisition. They pretty much put a bunch of holes in their foot and are hobbling along right now into obscurity.

At this point, bringing in Steve Ballmer could do no more harm than has already been done.

Re:There goes HP

[poetmatt]

MS makes false "positive move" towards investing in a company, company goes downhill. news at 11. It's a shame borders fell to that scheme, and amusing that facebook is on a downhill so fast. Usually it takes a while to go through a slow downhill while going out of business.

Re:There goes HP

[postbigbang]

There's that little Apple exception you'll have to note.....

Re:There goes HP

[laffer1]

You underestimate Steve Ballmer.

Re:There goes HP

[poetmatt]

What part of the apple exception is that? Their sales hit a giant bubble and since then have gone on a slow but perpetual downhill. Growth is not strong, anymore. It's almost hilarious when people think a gigantic cash hoard is a sign of success, when all they did was got lucky with marketing.

Re:There goes HP

[postbigbang]

I won't disagree that Apple seems to be blowing it.

But you cannot ignore their marketcap, and it's statistically relevant as an exception. I'm not a fanboi of almost anything. Still, incorrect empirical citations need to be challenged with the truth: Microsoft invested in Apple, but so far, no Black Widow effect, unlike many "investments" before. Like it or not, they are bigger than you, unless you're Exxon.

Re:There goes HP

[poetmatt]

I disagree about apple. see: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/06/25/big-apple-bigger-google/

Re:There goes HP

[postbigbang]

From your link: Here Apple is still well ahead, with a market cap of $378 billion versus Googleâ(TM)s $286 billion. You can subtract cash, look at debt, do may things. But Apple in this measure is larger than any tech company whether you like it, or not. That doesn't mean smarter or any other characteristic. For a corporation, however, this is a very powerful measure.

Re:There goes HP

[poetmatt]

okay, so you're only looking at "apple's total $$" and not "how much are they actually worth". Those are different. This isn't "market manipulation" or magic to show that Apple's value is (and has been) trending downwards and not upwards.

Having free cash just typically highlights how much tax avoidance is going on + company decision and has no true bearing on how well a company is actually doing. Which is why lots of free cash makes a company attractive for a buyout.

Re:There goes HP

[postbigbang]

What they are worth is exactly market cap. That's the number.

Free cash is stupid, IMHO, but we'll put that aside for a moment and look at the statement, "attractive for a buyout".

Reread what you just said, look at the numbers, and tell me you're serious. No one, as in zero people on this earth, can buy-out Apple. Not gonna happen. Although an otherwise reasonable platitude, there is a place where you cannot leverage sufficiently to buy out an organization this large, no matter who you are on this planet. But a few get to this size, but Apple is one of them.

Re:There goes HP

[poetmatt]

you're thinking way, way too hard. Why does any one individual need to buy them out? All it takes is a hedge fund of some large players, who combined can surpass apple's valuation. Bam, shell company, someone else owns them. Can you think of individuals and/or entities that could easily put down for that? Any company that thinks they're ever not subject to the risk of buyout is simply waiting for it to happen, 100% of the time. You should always be vigilant against buyout, otherwise someone will buy your dream and shut it down. Not that anyone would want apple anyway given an almost yearlong continuing slump, but eh.

Re:There goes HP

[postbigbang]

The list of possibilities is infinite. The reality that I've seen over the past 35yrs or so of being in the techbiz says: you're full of beans.

A smaller org, maybe. But there is a point where all the kings horses can't do it because they'd fight among themselves over such a wad of cash.

No, they're not quite totally immune. But they're immune: enough. They're a cash cow, have a cash wad, and have a tremendous rep in the marketplace. Nothing is forever, but frankly, you're dreaming. Wishful thinking doesn't make it so. What makes it so, is hard work.

I don't buy that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to that the fact that you actually have to work and people tend to toss their hands up. "It's hard to get people on ballots" and "I don't want to talk to my friends about voting" and such.

I did. In person.

You know what I heard?

"Well, if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about."

"We're living in a World with terrorism."

"I have nothing to hide."

And the worst: "Our Government wouldn't do such a thing! You're paranoid! They just want the terrorists!"

And a few of these people were fellow software developers and admins.

Now, I think people are starting to get it but they are currently being distracted but some other circuses now - like the one in Florida.

Re:I don't buy that.

[s.petry]

It's all about educating people, which is part of the "hard" I mentioned. Talking to people, and asking them to talk to people. I'm not saying I disagree with you mind you, I'm stating that you did have a choice. We all did, and still do.

It's not going to be easy to get change, but if more and more people start talking to people instead of being defeatist it can happen.

There he goes with the secrets...

[bogaboga]

While I wish him every success at his new post, question is, how many secrets will he take along with him to HP?

Re:What deal?

[Bigbutt]

I have somewhat of an idea of my friends' political leanings. Not all, but some. Some hide their preferences pretty well. But bringing them up will expose some of their odd beliefs (IMO) which makes being friends uncomfortable.

There's a guy at work I have to deal with from time to time. For some reason, a synapse failed and I accepted a 'friend' request on Facebook only to discover he's about as racist a person that I've encountered for many years. I even tried to have a discussion with him pointing out that your childhood experiences in a small town in Alabama isn't reflective of all members of that race. But he wouldn't accept it.

So instead of wasting my time and unnecessarily increasing my blood pressure, I choose to not discuss politics with, well most anyone that I actually know and have kept my voting choices somewhat to myself (he did start in on my choices because I had a bumper sticker to which he commented: "I thought you were smarter than that").

Heck, I rode my bike through the northern part of Idaho and saw some pretty scary bumper stickers (Obama with a cross-hairs over his face for example). I was concerned enough to not stop until I got to Montana.

[John]

Someone actually claims Lotus Notes???

[lexx21]

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. That HP would hire this guy knowing that he was part of the team that developed this "product" and thought it good enough to release is completely beyond me. Then again HP is shipping servers that have bad drives, bad power supplies, and at times bad mother boards right out of the box. I suppose that this is further proof that their computing line is no longer "quality is job 1". Slightly opinionated... probably. Frustrated from being forced to use Notes for 3 years... definitely.

Re:Someone actually claims Lotus Notes???

[Anonymous Coward]

Notes was a great product in its day, before Netscape came along and the world took notice of the WWW and Internet for the first time. The replicating document database with views model is something that was rock solid 20 years ago, and I doubt has been matched to this day. That was all Ray Ozzie - he did it with support for multiple transport stacks, TCP/IP but also Novell IPX/SPX, Microsoft NetBEUI, and I think what DEC had as well.

Notes was always "just OK" for email because the document databases were really what it was about. After MS came along with Exchange and Outlook, everyone standardized on those and expected mail clients to work like Outlook. They became the de facto standards for email UI, and frankly they were a lot better than Notes' email client, then and now.

I agree Notes sucks as an email client.

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.

Re:Someone actually claims Lotus Notes???

[St.Creed]

We just used Lotus Domino to complement the standard set of web-based software running on Oracle. There's loads of applications where you can use Domino as back-end, and for some things you really want to have it as a front-end. I'll take a gritty development environment for a few minor apps, over having to build that type of replication, security and encryption myself ANY day.

And Outlook and sharepoint may look better, but behind the scenes they're still crap. Domino wasn't holy, but it was functional and I've never seen it do the really weird stuff you can get with Microsoft's products. Our sysadmins all grew up on Outlook and Exchange, but after spending a few months with Domino they never wanted back. It was extremely safe and robust.

Now lets not have ...

[PPH]

... any biting the heads off bats.

Sorry. Wrong Ozzy. Never mind.

HP's been through Microsft Moles before.

[ron_ivi]

HP's been through this before.

Recall when HP had Executive HP Rick Belluzzo -- who's main accomplishment was killing HPUX on PA-RISC in favor of NT on Itanium -- even before NT-on-Itanium existed.

The same guy then moved on to SGI (where he killed IRIX and MIPS at SGI in favor of NT on Itanium).

Then he got rewared with a President + COO job at Microsoft - even though his main accomplishments to date had been to kill 2 of the leading 64-bit software platforms, and 2 of the leading 64-bit hardware platforms in favor of 64-bit-windows even before 64-bit-windows worked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo

I imagine Microsoft's paying HP well to hire Ozzie. If they can put their own plant at the top of HP; as well as buy Dell; perhaps they will manage to get back into the game.

Re:What deal?

[tlambert]

Unfortunately too many people believe the lie "Voting for a 3rd party harms you".

This would be true if the election were by direct popular vote; it's not. It's by the electoral college, which was the 1789 solution communications latency and people engaged in subsistence survival: with slow communications, you aggregated your vote and sent it by proxy.

One of the emergent properties of the electoral college system is a two power block arrangement; this has been codified into law in 35 U.S. states, where it is illegal for electors to split the states votes (Utah has a law making it a felony - otherwise, Ross Perot would have gotten one elector from Utah in the 1992 presidential election).

Of course, we no longer have the communication latencies that make an electoral college necessary, and we are far past subsistence survival, but it not in the self interest of the people currently in power to change the existing setup, since the emergent properties are to their benefit.

LMAO

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Something about the deaf leading the blind jumped into my head reading this.

Re:What deal?

[SlashV]

If you put it like that, it looks like there is no way to change the system other than violent revolution. Interesting.

Re:What deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you put it like that, it looks like there is no way to change the system other than violent revolution."

There is another way--stop trying to use technology to inform the people you care about, whomever they may be. Invite them over for a beer, talk to them. Discuss, person to person. That method of dissent, discussion and creativity has not yet been compromised. You'll know when that happens.

In the mean time, relax. Getting your panties in a bunch now means getting caught with your pants down later.

Re:What deal?

[Merk42]

Yes because ~your party~ is a special little snowflake and not prone to the same sort of buy-out corruption of any politician regardless of it's party affiliation.

Re:What deal?

[s.petry]

What you point at means that we (all of us) need to wake people up and have every State vote for the same 3rd party guy. If more than 50% of the popular vote went to Perot, or Paul, or anyone the electorate would have to issue their votes that way (or suffer the people's vengeance). If the people vote for X and the electorate votes for D or R then it would mean we must revolt (If I lived in Iowa and was an R I would be embarrassed, but loud). Paul is proof that you can be shammed out of a spot on the ticket if a good person runs on a R or D ticket, but when Paul an independent does not have to win a primary.

Until we prove that the system is broken, we must assume it works. Assuming it's broken when history shows otherwise is foolish. Being a defeatist will not pull you out of a shit hole, it makes you stink!

Back to the point on educating. Talk to _everyone_ and have them do the same. Believe it or not, I have gotten more people to read Plato's Republic than I can count. Those same people have seen the cave, and don't like living in it. It's not easy, but it does work. Also, the more people that tell the people the more they will believe.

Yeah yeah, the hard part is the President. Easier ones are Congress and Senate. People need to start railroading those people out of office and get real people in office.

Re:What deal?

[s.petry]

First off I don't have a party, so you are lying in your first statement. The rest of what you state hints at severe mental illness. Allowing corruption because it's "my people" is like advocating hate crimes because you are white/black/etc. It shows that you are socially retarded at a minimum, but also not intelligent enough to understand complex issues beyond bigotry.

If you bother to read any of my other posts you would see that I'm a pretty firm believer in the US as a Republic very similar to how Socrates defined it. I'd recommend you read it, but if you have trouble following a slash dot post I'm guessing it will be a lost request.