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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."
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.
While I wish him every success at his new post, question is, how many secrets will he take along with him to HP?
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
I'm not sure what a Scottish minister or South African soldier has to do with any of this.
Perhaps you meant William Hewlett?
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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.
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.
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.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
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.
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.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)