How Ray Ozzie is Changing Microsoft 266
prostoalex writes "The October issue of Wired magazine takes a look at Ray Ozzie's work with Microsoft. To hear the article describe it, he's rebuilding the company from the ground up. A 70,000-employee company is quietly changing its ways by thinking of software as deliverable services that perhaps could be rented on a monthly subscription basis." From the article: "There are, of course, two major reasons for Ozzie's ascendancy at Microsoft: Gates and Ballmer. Ozzie is one of the few technologists anywhere whom they respect; they'd been trying for years to get him to join the company. Now he's carrying their hopes for the future, and it's a heavy load. Ozzie needs to move Microsoft from selling software in a box to selling lightning-fast, powerful online applications ranging from gaming to spreadsheets. The risks are enormous. The mission is to radically alter the way the company sells its most profitable software and to pursue the great unknown of so-called Web services - trading an old cash cow for an as-yet-to-be-determined cash cow. No, Microsoft doesn't think its customers will stop using PCs with hard drives and work entirely online, but the desktop era is drawing to a close, and that promises to force some painful trade-offs."
Re:"Perhaps"? "Quietly"? (Score:4, Informative)
I remember Gates talking about subscription servicesvs one-time licensing long before the internet came along. The question has always been how to make this great leap, without orphaning or crippling their existing install base business. Ironically their greatest threat (the internet) will become their greatest enabler.
My company is using MS Project Web and MS Outlook Web to a large extent, and I am very impressed. How come we're all happy to use gmail, google maps, google calendar, etc but not a web version of MS word, MS outlook, or MS Project? There will always be a practical need to local installations and local software, but a centralised produtivity app model has tremendous advantages.
How many times is Microsoft going to announce this (Score:3, Informative)
Frankly, they shouldn't keep running their mouth about these big grand ideas if they're never gonna actually follow through. Sure, they released .NET and have done small parts of what they said they'd do, but so far nothing has come close to completely changing the company the way they keep claiming.
Re:Service? (Score:3, Informative)
I really don't understand how Microsoft is planning on making a go of this, though. All their applications have pretty modest (hell, miniscule) requirements compared to large software systems. I mean, I can see the incentive when you're talking about dropping support and maintenance contracts on several racks of high-end servers and their associated costs (personnel, power, cooling, floor space). But what are you going to save by going to a service-oriented word processor or spreadsheet? Even their Great Plains stuff takes maybe a separate box for SQL Server, but not much else.