Former Microsoft Exec Ray Ozzie Named To HP Board 52
theodp writes "GeekWire reports that HP has named former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie to its Board of Directors. Ozzie, known for his early work on collaboration technologies including Lotus Notes, has been working on his own startup since leaving Microsoft in 2010. Ozzie recently sounded off on the NSA spygate affair, suggesting it's time to revisit the deal we made with the 9/11-privacy-devil."
Re:There goes HP (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, unlike Nokia they are in more than one line of business. But they have been executing poorly for some years and have a history of doing dumb acquisitions, culminating in the disastrous Autonomy deal in 2011. Ray Ozzie can't by himself fix any of that. But arguably he can't be worse than the slate of directors who got them to where they are.
Re:There goes HP (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true. HP "went" ten, fifteen years ago since they hired Carly Fiorina as CEO. You can argue that they imploded from the dot-com bust, but I think their downfall began much, much earlier. They squandered the Compaq acquisition and the Palm acquisition. They pretty much put a bunch of holes in their foot and are hobbling along right now into obscurity.
At this point, bringing in Steve Ballmer could do no more harm than has already been done.
Re:Someone actually claims Lotus Notes??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Notes was a great product in its day, before Netscape came along and the world took notice of the WWW and Internet for the first time. The replicating document database with views model is something that was rock solid 20 years ago, and I doubt has been matched to this day. That was all Ray Ozzie - he did it with support for multiple transport stacks, TCP/IP but also Novell IPX/SPX, Microsoft NetBEUI, and I think what DEC had as well.
Notes was always "just OK" for email because the document databases were really what it was about. After MS came along with Exchange and Outlook, everyone standardized on those and expected mail clients to work like Outlook. They became the de facto standards for email UI, and frankly they were a lot better than Notes' email client, then and now.
I agree Notes sucks as an email client.