Ray Ozzie is the CEO Microsoft should have had instead of Ballmer.
He actually understands tech, and is a visionary. Ballmer could just as easily have sold used cars, and doesn't have the deep knowledge and vision of software that's essential to running a company like Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie is not CEO material, imo, personality wise, that's why he didn't take the position (I'm sure he could have had it). Ballmer is CEO material certainly, but not good CEO material.
MS is in a bad place currently top-level management-wise.
In the same sense, would you say Bill G was prototypical CEO material? No, but look what he built. Ozzie is awkward too, but he founded and sold two software companies for a fortune. Zuckerberg is introverted and awkward too, but look what he has built. The notion that a CEO, especially in tech, should be a business degree toting, people-person, non-technical CEO like Ballmer is wrong.
I don't care about prototypes, I'm just talking about results. Bill Gates was an atypical CEO, but he had a combination of business, technical, and personal acumen that worked effectively together. Neither Ozzie nor, so far as history has judged, Ballmer have anywhere near that same level of capability. At best they appear to do no better than J. Average non-tech savvy CEOs. In a world filled with folks like Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs that level of skill is a recipe for getting your ass handed to you in the market.
Has Ballmer demonstrated a particular adeptness with numbers or the nuts and bolts of operating a massive corporation? We know he's not a product visionary, but from my seat he's really a mid-level salesman who is the epitome of the Peter Principle.
Over the past decade, Microsoft's problem (imo as a former employee) is that they tried to do too many things and grew too fast at a time when they were not able to attract the best employees.
This creates a situation for the (hiring) quality bar to go down and for politicians to thrive.
I think most of MS's biggest problems are symptoms of its size. MS has had empire-itis from the beginning. From their original mission statement, through their huge acquisitions, through their refusal to spin off substantial portions of their company, their approach to competition, etc, etc. If they had been organized differently or if they had been split up into different corporations as a group they'd probably be better off today. Not least because each group would have the freedom to make the choices they need to (free of the MS overarching strategy straight-jacket) and they'd have the motivation to build truly great and disruptive things, rather than the relying on the usual strategy of getting it sorta-kinda right on the nth try through sheer brute force (read: massive investment from Windows/Office profits of the past).
P.S. Also a former MS employee, for what it's worth.
I remember watching the Ballmer/Ozzie interview at this year's All Things D conference, and wondering how the two of them even work at the same company. The contrast between the way they talked about Microsoft's products, and technology in general, was a really startling juxtaposition.
As Microsoft CSA, Ozzie had to live up to the legacy of Gates while steering the direction of hundreds of product groups. This is certainly no simple task.
Ultimately, he was doomed to fail. His job was to advocate the right technologies at the right time. Yet MS rarely makes the right choices in this area. Technology decisions are made by political GMs who want to hold on to their empires. They are made by VPs who don't want to sacrifice short term profits for a longer term vision.
Steve Jobs made an excellent point at the D conference this year about how Apple tries to pick technologies that are in their "Spring". These are technologies that are on their way up. Certainly Steve has the luxury of not worrying as much about backwards compatibility, etc. But he certainly has the courage of his convictions to pick a path that's best for his company and customers.
I don't think Ray had that kind of fortitude, and unfortunately, I don't think he had that kind of power. Ultimately, the CEO needs to push the technological vision of Microsoft. Leaving it to mid-level managers will only result in further mediocrity.
Exactly! Jobs picked BSD (1977), the NeXT GUI (1985/1988), and an object oriented version of C (1986) that came before C++ (1983)! (OK, BSD had been around a little while by that time, and C++ predated Objective C.) They are mature technologies now, but were all picked relatively early in their life.
You certainly note some fair examples for your point. However, I was referring to Apple's choosing of HTML5 instead of Flash. The easy choice that probably benefits mostly in the short-term is to play nice with Flash. Ultimately, Jobs and his team felt the best customer experience was to ditch Flash much to the malign of developers. Would Microsoft made such a decision? And who at Microsoft makes those decisions? Where does the buck stop?
I would like you to explain a little more how C++ is more "cutting edge" than Obj-C, etc.
BSD is still used in Free/Open/Net/BSD; and Next's GUI was based on Display Postscript, which was easily tuned for PDF (PS and PDF are very similar languages)
What you will notice is that all of these choices were designed by very small teams, sometimes just 1 person was involved in the original design:
BSD - Bill Joy and a few others made the major design decisions
Next GUI - Keith Ohlfs, on top of DPS licensed from Adobe
Objective C - designed mainly by Brad Cox
You missed the Mach kernel, originally a small research project from CMU, Avie Tevanian worked on porting Mach to a multi-processor system in the early to mid 1980s.
Can't fault you on your points -- they're all solid, but I would say there's a glaring omission. Cutting edge user experience (and that includes usability) does underpin Apple's success.
> Certainly Steve has the luxury of not worrying as much about backwards compatibility
Not all the time. Let's not forget about the Universal Binaries (a solution for the transition to Intel) and the Carbon API:
Carbon provides backward compatibility for existing Mac OS X software, while serving as a stepping stone for developers porting procedural applications from other platforms. [1]
A "Universal Binary" is the exact same thing as a "Fat Binary," the only difference is that marketing gave it a new name.
If you look at the mach-o header of a binary that contains multiple architectures (initially, ppc/68k or now, i386/x86_64/ppc), the first 8 bytes will be either 0xcafebabe or 0xbebafeca, depending on your endianness. These values are also #define'd as FAT_MAGIC or FAT_CIGAM in <arch/fat.h>.
If you're on a Mac, you can check this by typing `open -h fat.h` into a Terminal and opening up the binary of a universal app in a hex editor.
"His job was to advocate the right technologies at the right time. Yet MS rarely makes the right choices in this area. Technology decisions are made by political GMs who want to hold on to their empires."
So he had much responsibility and little authority, always a combination that guarantees failure.
Is it relevant to mention that Ozzie was/is one of joelonsoftware's canonical examples of "Architecture Astronauts" (that is, someone whose idea of minimum viable product is every app sharing everything)?
But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.
It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.
And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.
Ballmer should have been gone instead of Ray. I will not be surprised if Bill comes back(aka like what Jobs did when he came back to Apple). Granted Microsoft may not be in as bad a shape as Apple was when Jobs came back and Gates is no Jobs, but I am sure with Ballmer incharge for few more years, it might get that bad.
Very unlikely, I think. Jobs was forced out and felt he had a lot to prove. Gates left voluntarily as the richest man in the world. There's very little chance of him coming back.
It would actually look rather egotistical for him to come back. Even in Jobs case I think there's more a series of serendipitous events that rewarded intuition. Apple's success is a product of hard work and competitive complacency in the market.
A friend of mine recently opined that "I never imagined I'd live in a world where Bill Gates is practically a walking saint and Steve Jobs has become The Man."
I think Bill's passion has shifted too far away from Microsoft's business for him to ever come back in earnest. I assume that's why he left in the first place.
Jobs, on the other hand, was immersed in the same tech/philosophy at NeXT that he would subsequently use to revitalize Apple.
Why the hell would he come back, to what must be one of the most annoying and stressful jobs in the world, at least at this time for Microsoft. He can only lose, he can't win. Even if he does well, he would just have put Microsoft back on track to where it was before, and if he fails he gets a lot of grief.
And why would he give up all his projects and free time, for no gain at all.
Scott Guthrie would be great for the role. He's one of the few people I've met that is actually an exceptionally good developer, understands vision, and has strong leadership skills.
I have heard the knock that he is a bit "empire" focused. But moving him to CSA would force him to view the company as his empire rather than an org.
I agree. ScottGu both has the technical chops and the ability to ask hard questions. I had the opportunity to work directly with him (and his many-managers-ago lead, Mark) and have nothing but respect for him.
A return to the CSA role could be just what the company needs. "Back in the day," BillG reviews meant something. Your product could be completely shelved, and even though you could argue it was a huge waste of time for the team, it forced much harder thinking about every area of your product because you just never knew what he was going to ask about and expect you to have in-depth, well-researched answers about.
I always thought Ray was too nice and too high-level-vision of a guy to be in the role he was titled with. There's a reason you don't make the nicest guy in the platoon the next drill sergeant, no matter how well they do on the procedural tests and describing the goals of the next version of your military.
I should be clear, I've also heard he is very nice and the guy that you want to work for. But I've also heard that he's not afraid of replicating another groups work if he doesn't like how its done. Of course this is all second and third hand, and maybe "empire" was the wrong term. But my point was that with all of MS under him, he would push to consolidate redundant projects, rather than taking them head-on.
>But my point was that with all of MS under him, he would push to consolidate redundant projects, rather than taking them head-on.
Which is something Microsoft desperately needs, IMO. Just look at their mobile division -- WM6.x, WP7, and the Kin were projects that should have drawn from Microsoft's strengths and just went totally disparate directions. In the Kin's case, Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring Danger Inc only to totally squander the Sidekick brand, drive off many of the developers from the acquisition, and then ultimately ditch the entire project shortly after launch.
Then you have things like how they're only just now trying to integrate Zune into their handset strategy after they've all but killed that brand, as well.
Microsoft has just struck me as an incredibly schizophrenic company for some time now. They tend to develop multiple overlapping technologies that really ought to be approached as a single platform, but at the same time try to shoehorn their existing technologies into places where they just aren't going to work.
Frankly, what Microsoft desperately needs is somebody that can step in, say "this is going to be the Microsoft Way of handling X" and get the company on the war path. Microsoft owns so many genuinely great technologies that it's almost heartbreaking to see the way they perpetually fail to come up with any real, cohesive way of bringing it all together.
Given Ray Ozzie was the mastermind behind Windows Azure (launched in 2010), Microsoft's cloud computing offering that competes with Amazon's Web Services and Google's App Engine (and Google Docs), this can't be a good sign.
In fact, this is a further indication of Microsoft's struggles in each key market that represents the future of computing: cloud computing, thin devices, and online media.
First consider cloud computing, with Windows Azure. I found it difficult to find any concrete data on how Azure is performing in the market, but I suspect it’s not performing well. Put simply, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft is aggressively developing or marketing Azure, since cloud computing offerings directly threaten Microsoft’s revenues and profitability in the PC market, especially its Windows and Office products.
Next, consider Microsoft’s performance in thin devices, especially smartphones, video game consoles, and portable media players. With a current global market share of just 4.7% (Gartner, 2010), Microsoft is behind every other major mobile OS developer, including Symbian, Android, iOS, and Blackberry. In video game consoles, the Xbox 360 is trailing far behind the Nintendo Wii in market share, despite the fact that the Wii is using older generation technology (VGChartz, 2010). The Zune portable media player has a paltry 2% market share, compared to the iPod’s 70% (NPD, 2010). And Microsoft hasn’t revealed a clear strategy to compete in important and emerging thin device categories, such as tablets and connected televisions.
Moving on to online media, consider Microsoft’s performance in search or in online music or video. According to comScore (2010) Google has a 66.1% share of the search market, compared to 11.2% for Microsoft. And while Google generated $23.65 billion in revenues and $6.5 billion in income from search related advertising in 2009, Bing generated just $2.2 billion, with a $2.35 billion operating loss in its most recent fiscal year. Meanwhile, Microsoft is well behind Google and Apple in the online music and video markets (e.g., Microsoft’s Zune marketplace versus Apple’s iTunes or Google’s YouTube versus Bing video).
In closing, Microsoft’s financial performance since its initial public offering in 1986 has been nothing short of phenomenal. But if Microsoft wants to remain a leader in the future of computing, it must quickly and aggressively shift its focus and investments away from desktops and packaged applications to a combination of cloud computing, thin devices, and cloud computing. Given a bulk of Microsoft’s financial performance ($4.5 billion in quarterly profits!) and its core capabilities rest with Windows and Office, I am pessimistic that it has the interest or ability to make this fundamental transition.
I just posted this to my blog and submitted the post to HN. If you enjoyed the read, I'd appreciate an upvote (the article title is "Is Microsoft in trouble?"). Thanks!
One of the things Jobs did when he returned was cut all the distracting crap and refocus the company on what it was good at.
One of the things that's always mystified me is the vast vast software and hardware product lineup that Microsoft has to service...mostly in areas it's not terribly good at. If you really look at where Microsoft has done well, it's not in consumer electronics devices like music players or phones, online services like search, consumer software like flight simulators or whatever and unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make computers (and probably shouldn't)...Microsoft does one thing and one thing really well, productivity software and providing centralized management of the enterprise. Both areas that they really don't have any serious competitors in. Apple doesn't care much about the enterprise, and iWorks is just a passable replacement for Office.
For my money, I still can't buy a comparable office productivity suite anywhere. iWorks is not bad, OO.org stinks, and everything else is distant also rans. Outlook on the Exchange ecosystem simply is awesome. And Windows these days ain't half bad.
Why are these pieces of software great? Because they can be abused beyond all recognition to do tasks so far off script that it can sometimes be jaw dropping, and still they function exactly fine...and the path to that madness isn't really all that long...and in a pinch, you can MacGuyver together an Office solution to many real world problems in a snap and the software will see you through the day. It's not great software, it's generally poorly designed, and full of feature creep, but it gets you through some serious pinches. Some of these user patterns are so common that they've become the defacto use for the software. Does anybody balance their checkbook in Excel anymore?
Microsoft needs to stop mucking about in areas that they'll never have a credible presence and focus the entire company on this core competency. We will always, always, always, need email, a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool.
Questions they should be asking themselves:
Why doesn't Exchange and Outlook expose enterprise IM better? This should be standard everywhere.
Why does collaboration with Office products still stink?
Why don't I have an instant file name search tool with optional content index built into the OS better than the crap they already provide? Something like everything http://www.voidtools.com/ with a Lucene index for full text search. This stuff doesn't have to drag the entire OS down.
Why doesn't Microsoft have a centralized and updated on-line repository for driver management (redirect-able to a local Enterprise server)?
Why does every Windows computer not ship with an IDE and half a dozen languages? How come I don't have Perl & Python installed by default?
Why the hell is Visio so poorly integrated with the other Office tools? This seems like a no brainer to me. The amount of half-assed diagram and chart building people do in PowerPoint is absurd.
Why doesn't Microsoft control the end-user software distribution channel by now? Why do I have Steam installed when Microsoft built everything to support gaming on my PC except for that last bit? Seriously, what the hell?
Why does the built in defragger suck so bad? Why do I have to defrag at all?
Why do I have to get virus scanning software? Why does Microsoft make virus scanning software and hardly promote it? Why isn't that just part of some Windows update? Don't look for something to certify protection status, and then not be the provider of that software.
Why does IE consistently suck? If there's ever a productivity tool that needs to be the best in class like Word and Excel, it's IE.
Why does Office not have photo and video productivity software? It doesn't have to be great, Paint.net is pretty good for photo editing. Ditch Paint, and get with it. There's some upsell opportunity here, everybody needs a paint program. For that matter, make a variant of PowerPoint as a stupid simple Vector Graphics tool...everybody uses it for that anyway, just formalize it and turn it into a revenue opportunity.
How can we better integrate our Office products? Everybody routinely uses the other tools to build content for Word documents, and Word to edit text for the other tools. Cut all the overlapping crap out and just use those tools instead. I shouldn't have a table and a drawing editor in Word, but I should be able to paste something from Excel into Word without the formatting getting screwed all to hell and the table running past the edges of the document margins. Just open the appropriate tool for the job when needed.
And then I should be able to use the copy and other assets I make in Word to better feed Publisher (which is also something strangely absent from most Office installs, but does a passable job for simple Desktop Publishing).
Basically, make your content generating tools generate content for each other, do it really well, and then open the APIs so other people can play in this new productivity ecosystem.
You know what I routinely need? I need a best in class OCR tool to mass OCR lots of scanned documents. That would make me super productive. Why isn't that part of Office? Why am I stuck with an absolutely unusable and ancient format designed for digital faxes?
You know what I would have given a left foot for in High School and College and Grad School? A decent, highly integrated CAS (not Excel), at least on par (and preferably compatible with) with my TI-89, but at better resolution with more features and functionality, and that let me copy and paste equations and such from-to the tool.
Microsoft already owns this area, they should be looking for more ways to monetize on it. I just gave them 3 or 4 new products they could sell as part of a bonus back for Office and make some cash off of it. Instead, we get Bing, Zune, Windows Phone, Songsmith, Streets, WorldWide Telescope, Autocollage and other useless, aborted or otherwise DOA products.
Why the hell does Microsoft still have Works? Even the webpage for Works https://www.microsoft.com/products/works/default.mspx looks like an abortion. Seriously, who is the target for that? Just sell a cheaper Office and keep everybody in your one software ecosystem.
A simpler question is, why doesn't Microsoft have people like you working for them? My bet is, someone that came into an interview talking like that would be considered by someone, somewhere, eventually in the hiring process to be "too ambitious" and feel their job is threatened.
Supposedly Windows usability is tested up the yin yang, but I (as could millions of other people) could easily come up with a list of 100+ items that could make a real, tangible improvement in the windows user experience. Anyone with similar ideas I suspect would also fail the interview process at some point.
I'd say its a fair speculation that one difference between when Bill was running the company and now, is that people used to be hired based on what they could do for Microsoft overall, and now they are hired based on what they can do for the career of the person at Microsoft hiring them. Bill used to run Microsoft with an all seeing eye and an iron fist, just as Steve does now with Apple.
> A simpler question is, why doesn't Microsoft have people like you working for them?
> Supposedly Windows usability is tested up the yin yang, but I (as could millions of other people) could easily come up with a list of 100+ items that could make a real, tangible improvement in the windows user experience.
I'm not even saying that my particular ideas are very good...I think you hit the nail on the head...that these ideas are pretty universal and obvious. Microsoft is floundering in almost every area it's in. Why doesn't the board also see these obvious ideas and question why they aren't happening?
Lots of people are lamenting Ozzie leaving, but I think he's just as much part of the problem. Nobody at all cares about Microsoft's cloud computing initiative. Yet he's credited as the architect and a major force for good within MS. I'd be hesitant to lavish all that much praise on him, I mean, this is the guy that was the brain behind the wretched Lotus suite (I've yet to meet anybody who's ever liked using it) and Groove, which sits largely unused on most people's systems, and was a major force for the endless money hole for many of Microsoft's distracting web initiatives. I'm focusing on these because these are the things that he's touted for by Microsoft...yet I'd call none of those things major successes.
My bet is, someone that came into an interview talking like that would be considered by someone, somewhere, eventually in the hiring process to be "too ambitious" and feel their job is threatened.
What's that saying about not attributing something to conspiracy when you can attribute it to incompetence?
I'm sure 99% of new hires at Microsoft think they're going to change the world just like the guy above. The answers are simple! Just do X, Y, and Z!
It's pretty apparent that you just can't turn the ship that fast anymore at Microsoft. Hell, if a 'visionary' (I hate that word) like Ozzie can't make a dent in the culture, what fate is in store for the rest of the employees?
People wonder why MS doesn't have the kind of buzz among developers like Google or Facebook. My guess is that seeing things like this in the media go a long way.
> Why doesn't Exchange and Outlook expose enterprise IM better? This should be standard everywhere.
Office Communicator handles inter-office IM well, including handy features like integrated desktop sharing.
> Why does collaboration with Office products still stink?
I loathe it when used as a public-facing CMS, but the recent versions of SharePoint offer impressive collaboration/versioning when coupled with Office on desktops.
> Why does the built in defragger suck so bad? Why do I have to defrag at all?
You don't. This has been happening automatically in the background since Vista. The tool is mostly still there just to scratch psychosomatic itches.
> You know what I routinely need? I need a best in class OCR tool to mass OCR lots of scanned documents. That would make me super productive. Why isn't that part of Office? Why am I stuck with an absolutely unusable and ancient format designed for digital faxes?
Office started shipping with OCR starting in the 2003 version. It's integrated in the products if you scan directly into them, or look for the Microsoft Office Document Imaging tool that gets installed along with Office to do that standalone.
> Why doesn't Microsoft control the end-user software distribution channel by now? Why do I have Steam installed when Microsoft built everything to support gaming on my PC except for that last bit? Seriously, what the hell?
> Why do I have to get virus scanning software? Why does Microsoft make virus scanning software and hardly promote it? Why isn't that just part of some Windows update? Don't look for something to certify protection status, and then not be the provider of that software.
Specifically, Anti-Virus & programming IDEs. If they tried to include either of those things out of the box they would be strung up by their 3rd party vendors. :/
I don't disagree with you to a point. But Microsoft already pretty much owns the IDE space on PCs. Outside of Eclipse and maybe the authoring tools for Flash, there really isn't much else out there.
Anti-virus is even more interesting because Microsoft actually does make a pretty decent anti-virus software but it's almost not advertised at all.
I have no idea why you think that (paid, subscription-based) cloud computing offerings threaten Microsoft's revenues. In fact they've been trying to get people to move to a subscription model for like a decade now - which is understandable, since competition with their own previous versions and keeping people on the upgrade cycle has always been one of their biggest problems - and they are definitely aggressively promoting it (considering that this year's and the last two years' PDCs are largely focused around it).
They are threatened in the consumer space by the trend towards web applications, they're not threatened in the enterprise space by the trend towards subscription-based cloud services (which is overhyped - including by Microsoft! anyway, but that's another story) - they welcome it. I guess people are conflating the two.
We recently used it on a project, but the project was a very pro Microsoft and due to politics on the client's end, we pretty much did MS for everything.
Does anyone else find it to be odd timing for this move? Ozzie just started blogging again on the 14th (http://ozzie.net/2010/10/14/hello/), and here 4 days later it's announced that he's leaving Microsoft. Maybe that's why he was trying to build his own unique audience again...
Perhaps I'm just naive/ignorant, but I can't tell if this is a positive progression for Ozzie? Ballmer mentions Ozzie's retirement, is Ozzie just transitioning out of the workforce? Or did MS decide Ozzie's leadership is no longer positive for the company? The article does say "His leadership not particularly well-respected among employees in the trenches"
My impression is that there's never been a particularly good relationship between the product groups at Microsoft and the more long-term focused researchy groups (not necessarily limited to MS Research proper?). A lot of "employees in the trenches" of the product groups seem to perceive the researchy guys as useless, impractical, a waste of money, etc.
Ozzie's concrete responsibility at MSFT, so far as I can tell, was running a bunch of medium-term focused groups to try and bridge that divide. They seem to have been generally regarded as unsuccessful in that respect so it's not too surprising that he would eventually quit/be pushed out/whatever.
The problem with Microsoft and leadership is the same as in every big company. To truly do something different and innovative you need a benevolent dictator that can put down their feet and say "I don't care what you think, we're doing this and it's going to be great".
You need both the political power within the company to get things done and have the visionary skills to know what needs to be done. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both obviously has/had this to some degree and could coax, bully and motivate people to see their way. Radical change needs radical leaders.
Ray Ozzie is a great technical visionary but he probably wasn't enough of a dictator to accomplish the radical changes Microsoft needs to stay lean and current. If you could put Ray's technical acumen into Steve's bullying body you would have the perfect CEO :)
Could anyone tell me what exactly Ray Ozzie has done since bill gates left? I honestly can't think of anything, but I don't think that is true. I just think he's been a bit more low key. Everything MS is coming out with has Ballmer's face on it.
My understanding is that the projects he was most directly associated with have been Windows Azure, Live Mesh, and (some of?) the various "Labs" groups - Live Labs, FUSE Labs - which have released a variety of smaller projects.
The timing of this release couldn't have been any worse; Apple reports yet another record-breaking quarter on the exact same day this gets airtime. Ballmer must be trying really hard to destroy MSFT shareholder value.
There is an old Gillmor Gang podcast that has an interesting conversation as to what the panel thinks Ray Ozzie would bring to Microsoft. It looks like it all turned to ashes though.
He actually understands tech, and is a visionary. Ballmer could just as easily have sold used cars, and doesn't have the deep knowledge and vision of software that's essential to running a company like Microsoft.
This is a bad day for MS.