Hail to the new chief geek
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By Richard Waters
The Financial Times
June 16 2006 19:16
Microsoft has a new brain. Ray Ozzie, a white-haired Chicago native with a courtly manner, is in many ways the anti-Bill Gates. More mild and conciliatory in style, he has none of the intensity that the Microsoft co-founder, his body rocking back and forth as he answers even the most seemingly innocuous question, always projects.
Yet make no mistake: Mr Ozzie's new role at the head of the world's most powerful software development organisation marks the emergence of a ferocious technology intellect. By promoting a man whose approach to software development may be more in keeping with the Google-obsessed era in which we live, it could also signal the latest in a series of internal revolutions that have proved how dangerous it is to underestimate Microsoft, a company often written off in the technology world as a lumbering giant unsuited to the changing times.
On Thursday, Mr Ozzie was anointed the software world's chief geek as Mr Gates formally handed over the job of running Microsoft's software strategy. While the Microsoft co-founder will continue to work full-time with Mr Ozzie for the next two years, before leaving to become non-executive chairman, the mantle has already passed.
For Mr Gates, this signals the impending end to a historic business career. He had already handed his chief executive role to Steve Ballmer in 2000. Now he has passed on responsibility for strategy and technology research to another lieutenant, Craig Mundie. That leaves Mr Ozzie to assume the central role of chief software architect, leader of an army of software developers that shaped the personal computer era.
Mr Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in April last year after his private software company, Groove Networks, was acquired, is a very different animal from the arch-business strategist Mr Gates. "Ray's a programmer's programmer," says Rob Enderle, a technology commentator. "He's much closer to an uber-engineer, whereas Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of years."
Mr Gates himself was once moved to declare Mr Ozzie "one of the top five programmers in the universe" and revealed that he and Mr Ballmer had wanted for more than a decade to persuade him to join Microsoft.
To the outside world, Mr Ozzie's programming prowess is known mainly through Lotus Notes, the e-mail and collaboration software that he masterminded, which was acquired by IBM in 1995. It is hard now to appreciate the impact Notes had on the software world - particularly since the product, under IBM's ownership, has been overtaken by Microsoft's Outlook software. Yet as one Microsoft executive says, Mr Ozzie's product, which pre-dated mass use of the internet, was radical, even if it did look rough around the edges. Notes was the product of years of personal rumination and points to Mr Ozzie's driving passion. From his first experience of computing at the University of Illinois in the early 1970s, his work has followed a single track: using software to make communication and collaboration between workers easier.
Mr Ozzie has pursued that passion through generations of technology, adapting his thinking and anticipating the next trends in technology architecture before they have been recognised elsewhere. His first taste of the power of computers to foster collaboration came with Plato, a mainframe computer system at the University of Illinois. The system was designed to handle early forms of messaging and group chat rooms, forerunners of the collaboration tools that are now central to Microsoft's work.
Notes applied similar ideas to the era of client-server computing that was coming into the ascendancy. Having left shortly after the IBM acquisition, Mr Ozzie founded Groove in 1997, adapting his thinking to peer-to-peer technology, a method of communication between computers that was eventually to shake the music industry with the emergence of Napster.
While his prowess as a visionary of the PC era ranks him alongside Mr Gates, Mr Ozzie's personal style and approach to software development differ in important ways.
Microsoft's strategy under Mr Gates has centred on what the company calls "integrated innovation" - the idea that by closely linking all of its software, from Windows and Office to its server products, Microsoft can produce better products than rivals that deal with only one part of the computing ecosystem. That, however, has introduced a level of complexity that has bedeviled Microsoft's development process, in part resulting in delays that have left the next version of Windows running years late.
Mr Ozzie is not about to throw out the giant software development visions that animate Microsoft. For big software projects like operating systems, he says, customers can only handle occasional new product releases.
However, since assuming a key role last summer he has been pressing for more rapid innovation in other areas, producing less ambitious products that meet narrowly targeted but clear goals - an approach similar to the one he pursued at Groove.
"We got a lot done with a small number of people in a relatively short amount of time," he said in an interview soon after arriving at Microsoft early last year. "Bringing technology together on time is fundamentally a leadership issue. I start from the outside in: what will define success when you ship [the final product]? If you don't have very crisp ideas, you end up with something that is way, way too long or didn't achieve what you wanted."
By setting limited but clear objectives for each project and by emphasising frequent re-releases of software, Mr Ozzie's style is in some ways more in keeping with the times than that of Mr Gates. Google has set the tone, issuing rapid new releases of its server-based software to bring out new services and frequent improvements of existing products.
Mr Ozzie, with Mr Gates' backing, quickly became the champion of a similar development approach inside Microsoft. His emergence as a driving force became clear last October, with an internal memo to senior staff - released with Mr Gates' encouragement - that warned of the dangers ahead if Microsoft did not change its way of working.
"Complexity kills," Mr Ozzie wrote. "It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." That stands as a warning of the risks that lie ahead if Microsoft cannot change its ways. But if the new chief geek can unblock the world's most powerful technology organisation, he may yet go on to unleash a new golden age of software development.
The Financial Times Limited 2006 |
