I'm catching up on some of my reading (more on that later). I was reading the
December issue of
WIRED.
I don't envy Ray Ozzie his situation. He's the new chief software architect at
Microsoft (taking over Bill's job). Questions need to be asked about whether
Microsoft's viability is certain. Ozzie is himself a wunderkind that Bill Gates
hs called the "one of the top five programmers in the universe". Certainly,the
proof is in the pudding. He invented Lotus Notes based on the research and
learning environment Plato (see this
good
article ), which he tinkered with during his college years. As an aside, I
note that the WIRED article attributes
Price
Waterhouse's purchase of Notes as a turning point for Ozzie and his work one
that eventually made it attractive to IBM, which then bought Lotus two years
later. My mother worked at Price Waterhouse during that time, and I remember her
having this incredible workgroup software on her laptop. It was only later that
I'd understand how powerful it was. Now, Ozzie isn't just changing the face of
office workgroups, he's chaning the landscape of the computer desktop in
general, and he's got to do it through Windows and Office.
He's come on strong. In 2005 he wrote, and with Bill Gates, sent a memo to high
level executives at Microsoft whose purpose was two-fold: evaluate the current
situation and landscape and map out what the future holds. He was writing on he
money in describing the next computing platform as a cloud based paradigm. The
latest and greatest out of Redmond confirms this. A lot of the stuff that was
supposed to be in Vista, including a cohesive service-oriented platform, seems
to be present in this new version of Windows,
Windows
Azure. It seeks to make the internet as much a fiber of the next generation
of applications as an operating system's kernel is today.
He's also previewed the cloud-friendly version of Office. For a good review,
check out this
MSDN
webcast. The cloud-friendly Office -- honestly, Linux and Java zealot that I
am -- looks really cool. The idea is that you can drift between the web, the
web, and the mobile version of the client. Finally, communal workflows are
supported natively -- they're showcasing examples where somebody makes a change
in a thick client and that change is propogated instantly to the ajax version of
a document. I'd love to see how that particular ESB's being secured. I wonder if
it's channeled centrally through Microsoft's servers, or if it's installable on
the client's servers? I know they mentioned Sharepoint, but I genuinely hope
they don't compel users to buy that whole boondoggle of a stack just to get the
integration features. 'Sides, what am I griping about? And, really, perhaps I'm
not their customer anyway. I'm using
OpenOffice
and Google Docs to write this.
But the question is -- is it too late?
Google Docs is
already thoroughly entrenched, and even Apple's
iWork
/iLife suite are in
the cloud already.
iTunes, the number one
music application and service by far, has been a thick-client/cloud hybrid since
day one, and has been doing it successfully. Even infrastructure has
successfully, and comercially, been made available through services like
Google's
App Engine and
Amazon EC2.
The list goes on and on (photo albums, email, etc.) for all the things Microsoft
might do that it doesn't do. It seems like the only thing they have left,
realistically, is the operating system itself. And in this respect, perhaps
Windows Azure is viabe. After all, I haven't yet heard about a cloud-oriented
version of OS X or Linux, though I'm not sure what makes Azure cloud-friendly in
the first place.
Perhaps he can turn the ship around. So far, I'm impressed with what I've seen.
What, exaclty, does "success" look like for Microsoft, though?
