Ray Ozzie announced that he was stepping down as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect last week, and has now released a memo to his former co-workers musing on his years as the company's top developer. While he commended the software-giant for all it had achieved recently, he acknowledged that there was still a long way to go, and that its history risked holding it back.
Brand new day
Entitled ‘Dawn of a New Day', the note was a follow up to a similar treatise written in 2005, before Ozzie took office. It acknowledged that Microsoft has made monumental changes in the past half a decade and truly embraced a "services transformation" towards providing a seamless, service-based experience across many of its products.
However, Ozzie noted areas that - even where Microsoft had the pioneering vision - some competitors had taken the lead.
He commented that "our early and clear vision notwithstanding, their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware & software & services, and in social networking & myriad new forms of internet-centric social interaction".
Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that Microsoft is hampered by the paradigm of the PC - computers, programs, folders, files and desktops.
A post-PC world
Ozzie therefore challenges the next generation of Microsoft employees to imagine a "post-PC world...if it were to ever truly occur". Developers and engineers must dissociate their concepts of computing from the hardware and software artefacts and towards constantly-connected devices and continuous, hardware-agnostic services. This will allow creators of future Microsoft products to cope with what he predicts will be a shift from a device-centric to a cloud-centric world.
Importantly, though, this shift must come from within the organisation, as opposed to from the management or driven by consumers - only then will the new approach 'stick'. He added that "those who can envision a plausible future that's brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead".
Ozzie's thoughts are certainly interesting, and definitely worth a read for anyone with a few minutes to spare. Most interesting, though, is that Ozzie's comments - as a Microsoft employee - seem to echo, in a constructive way, the opinions of many 'on the outside' with respect to the company's position in the market now, over the past few years and in the future.
