CNET has an interesting story this morning entitled Can one man reprogram Microsoft? That one man is Ray Ozzie, my former boss at Groove Networks, and current Chief Technical Officer at Microsoft.
Ray has already made a big impact. In October he wrote a manifesto The Internet Services Disruption which laid out the vision for "Software as a Service" and the basis for Windows Live and Office Live. Last month Ray announced SSE, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS, which will be offered under the Creative Commons license.
Back in September I wrote a post to this blog The Coming Web Services Tsunami which attracted a lot of attention inside Microsoft. There were a lot of people inside Microsoft aware and concerned about web services, but it was Ray who galvanized the company and set the vision with his manifesto in October.
SSE will open up lots of new opportunities for connecting web services to client applications. I reviewed the SSE vision in an earlier post SSE - a Microsoft innovation on RSS.
Ray is a big thinker, a true visionary, and a good business strategist. He has made a big impact already, and his leadership is just starting to emerge. Microsoft is a big company (60,000 employees, $40B in revenue) but can move quickly when necessary. Windows Live and Office Live will allow Microsoft to quickly offer new services, add-INS, and extensions to Windows and Office without needing to wait for the next major release cycle. Because of the size, complexity, and user base of these products the development and test cycles are several years. That is just too long in a fast changing web services world. Live lets Microsoft respond quickly.
The magic here is as much business strategy as it is technical vision. The trick will be to find the balance between web based services and client based application software, and take advantage of the strengths of each model, from both a technical and business perspective.
There is a lot at stake. Windows and Office together represent almost $25 billion a year in revenue with very high profit margins. Microsoft needs to preserve that revenue and profit, while augmenting it with web based services under a completely different business model.
Microsoft is really a collection of three large profitable divisions (Windows, Office, Development Tools and Servers) that represent almost $35 billion in annual revenue, and four smaller but very fast growing divisions that represent the remaining $5 billion in revenue. I detailed these divisions, their products, and revenues, in an earlier post Growing a Google Every Year..for 4 Years. These divisions have exciting products and services like box, MSN Search, Windows Mobile Smartphones, and Great Plains aka Microsoft Dynamics. All good businesses with good growth prospects.
Can one man reprogram Microsoft? Ray is a humble guy and would answer no. But, Ray Ozzie has already prooven several times that he can set a grand vision and lead to success. He is already leading Microsoft in new directions. Yes, he can do it.
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