With
Bill Gates' departure this week,
Ray Ozzie is
now the top software man at Microsoft. The accession of Ozzie, who
made his name creating Lotus Notes, comes at a critical time for
Redmond.
Gates, a software developer at heart, has driven the company by
creating new software for desktops PCs.
But Microsoft's strategy now is to develop its products to offer
software as a service and improve the way its software offers
online collaboration to compete with rivals
Salesforce.com and
Google.
Ozzie, with more than 30 years experience developing
collaboration software, looks like the man for the job.
His interest in collaboration software began at the University
of Illinois in 1973. Ozzie co-developed Plato Notes, a computer
conferencing system that allowed staff and teachers at the
Education Research Laboratory in the University of Illinois to
communicate. He later developed Decnotes, in which he extended the
conferencing concept by including a form of instant messaging.
Ozzie worked on developing a
PC-based Notes product, and with funding from Lotus founder
Mitch Kapor in 1984, established a company called Iris Associates
to develop Lotus Notes.
It is this work that has defined Ozzie's career. The experience
he gained is now the best hope for Microsoft overtaking its rivals
in the online colloboration.
When Lotus Notes first appeared in 1989, the technology to
support collaboration was still immature. The product included
on-line discussion, e-mail, phone books, and document databases,
many of the features that people take for granted today.
IBM bought Notes for £1.8bn in July 1995. In 1997 Ozzie formed
Groove networks, which developed software that allowed users to
create shared workspaces. Ozzie became Microsoft's chief technical
officer when Microsoft acquired Groove in 2005.
"I thought about 'Could we ever hire Ray and his team?' for a
long, long time," Gates said at the time of the acquisition.
Ozzie is now responsible for spearheading strategies such as
collaborative working and software delivered as a service at
Microsoft, in particular Windows Live and Office Live, the
company's subscription-based internet services for project and
customer management and sales reporting.
"We have discovered that collaboration technology is fairly
tough to get right: it lives at the intersection of technology,
social dynamics and organisational dynamics," said Ozzie in 2005,
when taking up his post at Microsoft. "We hope to apply that
knowledge not only to Microsoft Office System productivity
technologies but also, given the opportunity, across a range of
Microsoft offerings."
As
Microsoft's £22.3 billion attempted takeover of Yahoo
illustrates, the internet and the delivery of software as a
service over the internet is important to the company.
Microsoft and its customers are on a journey towards
collaboration over the web. But as the web is a far bigger market
than the desktop, where it is far simpler to switch software
suppliers, Ozzie will have to make sure Microsoft stands out from
the crowd.