

Rethinking Ray Ozzie - blueatlas
http://winsupersite.com/cloud/rethinking-ray-ozzie

======
chiph
I can't help but wonder how effective those memos would have been if he'd been
more direct, rather than use manager-speak. Passive voice just doesn't work
when you want to get people to take action.

 _Certain of our competitors ' products and their rapid advancement and
refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy_

could have been:

 _Our competitors are out-innovating us, and we 're losing to them. I hate to
lose and you should hate being losers too. So this is what we're going to do._

~~~
Danieru
I spent the summer at MS on an internship and I think I can say with
confidence that calling things as they are is just not something one does at
Microsoft. Will it could be the intern cocoon I also observed non-intern
targeted communications that showed the same behaviour.

Once I spent time with people they got more friendly and open. Yet if you do
get a good conversation going you can expect the managers at the table to hang
out of it. The managers always watch their words. Likewise if you talk to a
random person in the cafeteria they will toe the party line.

In contrast one is safe to criticize Microsoft products provided they have
been dropped or replaced. No love is shown for Windows Mobile or the Kin.

When you do criticize current practices/products in public there was an
unwritten rule that one should always reference the competition. No one calls
it out in words like "We can do better!", "This is user hostile!", "We're
being to greedy by doing X!". Instead it is "We should focus on X because our
competitor is going well on Y". Also "competitor" is always left non-specific,
just like it is in your quote.

As such considering Ray Ozzie's former high org chart position I must
congratulate him on saying as much as he did.

~~~
asveikau
I was an FTE at MSFT for a few years. I disagree with this assessment. In many
contexts Microsoft has a culture of tearing apart other people's ideas, I
suspect rooted in the legendary BillG rants ("stupidest idea I've ever heard",
etc.) and the overly internally-competitive culture. Additionally, rank and
file routinely complain about Microsoft being bad at marketing, Microsoft
being bad at consumer messaging, Microsoft building products for the Redmond
bubble and not for humans, etc. etc., and the internal dogfood aliases are
full of this stuff as are hallway and lunchtime discussions in many places.
Not to mention all those people carrying iPhones who used to joke that it was
"competitive research".

That's not to say that there aren't koolaid drinkers and that it won't ever be
politically unwise to directly criticize your colleagues... But it's a diverse
place, and, in my experience, cynicism exists in a big way there.

~~~
kevin_rubyhouse
I agree. I've been working in Windows Embedded for a couple years now, and I
work with some people in management not afraid to speak their minds to others
on the team. Sometimes the way they react or phrase things helps me think from
their vantage points.

Interns do seem to be treated differently though. Not many criticisms are
voiced around them.

------
CurtHagenlocher
What a silly claim. There's no question that the last decade at Microsoft is
full of faulty assumptions and bad execution. But these memos as visionary?
Feh!

1) 2005 is four years after Hailstorm
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HailStorm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HailStorm))
and already pretty late for a "services focus" to be forward-looking.

2) October 2010 is right about when Windows Phone 7 shipped, and therefore a
year after the "reset" of the previous phone effort. At this point, "devices"
is obvious to the point of "duh".

3) There's a world of difference between saying "X is important" and "X is
important, therefore we should do Y".

------
asveikau
Interesting quote from Ozzie:

> "The PC-centric/server-centric model has accreted simply immense
> complexity,"

This is presented as an insight. There is so little context given here, so
maybe I'm just missing something, but it sounds much more like bullshit to me.

What exactly is _less complex_ about "post-PC" or "post traditional server"?
On the client, minding battery life and constantly dealing with connection
loss is much more complex than an always-powered, always-connected PC. On the
server front, managing VM instances is in many ways more complex than just
running a single server, or a smaller set of them. People add these
complexities because they give them something in return. But it is adding
complexity, let us not deny it.

I never followed Ozzie too deeply, but this style of throwing around
programmer jargon to make an all-around "nothing" point seems to be his style.
I still remember hearing him say something along the lines of "RSS is the Unix
pipe of the web". I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt when I heard
that, to stretch my mind somewhat to believe that is actually a thing... But
let's face it, the analogy is nonsense.

~~~
webmaven
_What exactly is less complex about "post-PC" or "post traditional server"?_

The API, mainly. Compare the size and cruftiness of the Windows API with the
Android or iOS equivalents that a developer programs against.

~~~
eulerphi
Apple was smart and basically repurposed the OSX API for ios. But they always
had a good API. The original windows API is water trash. .Net is nice.

The only thing MS needs to do is go modern instead of legacy for their new
phones, but is that going to happen?

~~~
asveikau
> The original windows API is water trash.

You know, I let it slide when the comment you replied to said it, but I
disagree with this one. IMO most people who criticize Win32 just aren't
familiar with it. I've heard plenty of people dismiss objc on similar grounds:
simple unfamiliarity becomes "this is bad". Once you get over the initial
learning curve it's quite easy to be productive with it.

~~~
eulerphi
Kernel32 user32, advapi32, etc. Are you really going to tell me that the
namespacing and naming convention for their API, which mind you, used handles
and annoying type defs, was anything spectacular. I really hope you are
kidding. I reverse engineered windows for years, know a huge amount of
documented and undocumented api from ntdll and so on. The API is water trash,
you lose when you question my know-how on this topic.

~~~
asveikau
I was on the Windows team for a few years. I have seen the source code. There
is cruft as there will be with any project of its age, but it's not nearly as
bad as people say, especially if you can navigate it well. There are some good
ideas underneath. COM is generally a good idea. The mental model of message
pumps and window procs doesn't really have deep flaws, and lots of UI
frameworks on other platforms have the same ideas under the hood. You mention
ntdll, it's a shame more of that isn't public, because those APIs are often
cleaner than their public equivalents.

------
codeulike
Microsoft used to completely dominate everything, and now they dont, so people
think they have 'failed' in some way. But if you look at their profits they're
still making out like bandits. Over the last 5 years they've made a ton more
money than everyone except Apple. So perhaps Microsoft did the right thing by
not jumping in the direction Ozzie said straight away?

stats:
[https://twitter.com/janettu/status/380824535714377728](https://twitter.com/janettu/status/380824535714377728)

~~~
paganel
I'm not a business analyst or anything related, but I think the issue is that
in this day and age even huge profits don't mean a thing even when it comes to
a business's future. Just look at Nokia, which was dominating its market 7-8
years ago, or Blackberry/RIM.

You really do have to be paranoid to survive, and the memos in the article are
an example of that.

~~~
codeulike
We don't really know what a successful tech company looks like over longer
than 5 or 10 years, because no-ones ever stayed dominant longer than that.
Perhaps IBM is the only model - greatness that fades to a reasonable
profitable longevity. Perhaps thats the only way to go long term?

------
cafard
"While Ray Ozzie's time at Microsoft is widely regarded with disinterest by
those Windows watchers who even remember him,"

They are not interested, or they are able to take a disinterested, i.e.
impartial, view?

"it's clear now that the erstwhile Chief Software Architect was simply rowing
against a tide of internal calcification."

Somehow I picture a lake of milk.

------
frankus
Slightly OT, but in terms of "where are they now", Ozzie founded a (still
stealth-mode) startup called Talko:
[http://www.talko.com](http://www.talko.com).

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/ray-ozzies-stealthy-
startup...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/ray-ozzies-stealthy-startup-
talko-is-building-a-consumer-facing-mobile-communications-app-not-a-cloud-
based-mobile-backend/)

------
programminggeek
Ray Ozzie at least gave Microsoft Azure, which honestly if they didn't have
that much at least they would be nowhere on the cloud. He was working on
things like syncing files, email, office integration, etc.

Basically stuff like google docs, dropbox, heroku, etc. were all trying to be
made in Microsoft's image under Ozzie and they all sort of ignored him. Now
Microsoft is scrambling with SkyDrive, Office 365, Windows 8, Azure, etc.

Microsoft also pushed out J Allard who had vision to compete with iPad. His
team was also responsible for Xbox and Zune. Between Xbox you get the
blueprint of how to deliver services people love and evolve with over time.
With Zune you got the beautiful Metro design that Microsoft finally embraced.
The Zune player was pretty much the blueprint for this style and it was
outstanding software for a Windows app.

Microsoft 20 years ago was about finding brilliant people and letting them
build brilliant businesses under the Microsoft umbrella. At some point around
2000 the name of the game is to make all things Windows and Office and that
kind of protectionism pretty much put Microsoft consistently 3-5 years behind
in areas that matter like Search, Mobile, Services, Cloud Infrastructure
because they couldn't see how that benefitted Windows and Office.

