Rethinking Ray Ozzie

http://winsupersite.com/cloud/rethinking-ray-ozzie

by blueatlas • 13 years ago

66 39 13 years ago

chiph• 13 years ago

I can't help but wonder how effective those memos would have been if he'd been more direct, rather than use manager-speak. Passive voice just doesn't work when you want to get people to take action.

Certain of our competitors' products and their rapid advancement and refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy

could have been:

Our competitors are out-innovating us, and we're losing to them. I hate to lose and you should hate being losers too. So this is what we're going to do.

pinaceae2• 13 years ago

yet another memo. whenever you see such memos leaking, you know the company is in a bad shape. RIM, Nokia, MS - lots of famous memos, full of corporate speak and calls to action to do something with services, quality, paradigms and fundamental values of tectonic shifts.

effective leaders deliver products that customers buy. ineffective ones write memos to other "leaders".

sremani• 13 years ago

Microsoft does deliver products just because they got flak from Apple fanboy tech- press. Windows 8 is over 110 Million installs, I am not sure what other product from Microsoft you are talking about SharePoint, SQL Server, C# 5.0 .. yes, when Google is spaming Y-combinatory with daily Go post, Microsoft is actually developing a language that is 10 years and evolving.

Danieru2• 13 years ago

I spent the summer at MS on an internship and I think I can say with confidence that calling things as they are is just not something one does at Microsoft. Will it could be the intern cocoon I also observed non-intern targeted communications that showed the same behaviour.

Once I spent time with people they got more friendly and open. Yet if you do get a good conversation going you can expect the managers at the table to hang out of it. The managers always watch their words. Likewise if you talk to a random person in the cafeteria they will toe the party line.

In contrast one is safe to criticize Microsoft products provided they have been dropped or replaced. No love is shown for Windows Mobile or the Kin.

When you do criticize current practices/products in public there was an unwritten rule that one should always reference the competition. No one calls it out in words like "We can do better!", "This is user hostile!", "We're being to greedy by doing X!". Instead it is "We should focus on X because our competitor is going well on Y". Also "competitor" is always left non-specific, just like it is in your quote.

As such considering Ray Ozzie's former high org chart position I must congratulate him on saying as much as he did.

asveikau5• 13 years ago

I was an FTE at MSFT for a few years. I disagree with this assessment. In many contexts Microsoft has a culture of tearing apart other people's ideas, I suspect rooted in the legendary BillG rants ("stupidest idea I've ever heard", etc.) and the overly internally-competitive culture. Additionally, rank and file routinely complain about Microsoft being bad at marketing, Microsoft being bad at consumer messaging, Microsoft building products for the Redmond bubble and not for humans, etc. etc., and the internal dogfood aliases are full of this stuff as are hallway and lunchtime discussions in many places. Not to mention all those people carrying iPhones who used to joke that it was "competitive research".

That's not to say that there aren't koolaid drinkers and that it won't ever be politically unwise to directly criticize your colleagues... But it's a diverse place, and, in my experience, cynicism exists in a big way there.

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

Interns don't have access to litebulb, I think.

kabdib• 13 years ago

The /good/ managers called things "problems" and knew how to manage people well.

The /bad/ managers never wanted confrontation, were afraid to raise up problems, were autocratic to their reports and nebbishes to their own managers, and never tried to grow their people.

There are managers I regret leaving behind, and managers who I was very happy to see the back of.

randomfool• 13 years ago

Great ideas at any large org are worthless if you cannot clearly communicate and sell them. This is where Ozzie struggled at Microsoft.

It was a shame that they could not leverage him more effectively as I really think he had clear vision about where things were going.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

Typical at large, highly-corporate places I'm afraid.

I recall during one of my first internships (at Siemens, not Microsoft) my first task was to go over test results of electric motors being developed. I drafted an email with my results and fired it off to a number of people.

A short while later I was ushered off by one of the senior project managers. "Why'd you write that email?" "Um...?" "You don't call these things PROBLEMS, you call them ISSUES. Do you understand? You call them problems, people are going to think there are problems!"

And that was the moment I decided I wanted nothing to do with traditional engineering and the automative industry... unfortunately I had another 3.99 months to go on that internship at that point. The rest of the internship didn't go any better, and is still a massive source of antipatterns I still draw from today.

Funny note, those "issues" ended up costing the company millions in a product recall. Maybe they should've been called "problems" instead ;)

The neutering of language into corporate-speak is still one of the biggest red flags I look for when interviewing...

raverbashing• 13 years ago

"The rest of the internship didn't go any better, and is still a massive source of antipatterns I still draw from today"

Yes, my exact experiences with that company. Only it lasted a lot more time, at different stints. Sigh.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

From experience I can say that contrarian leaders in large & established companies walk the fine line between pushing for change versus self-preservation. There is an enormous amount of pressure/politics/resistance they face from the "old guard".

If they are too blunt and direct in suggesting change, their established rivals paint them out as someone who "does not understand or value the organization's history", or "does not get the culture" etc.

The CEO often prefers to sit on the fence, without putting his/her entire weight behind the contrarian. Because s/he does not (or cannot) risk antagonizing the majority of the old guard. In the absence of a CEO's or board's full support, the contrarians start getting stymied in their plans as time goes on. Their words become less sharper, their plans less disruptive and their canvas much less "blue sky". Till comes a time when they prefer to just leave rather than tilt at windmills.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I think he was trying to get the message across without getting himself fired - at least in the first note. I'm not sure if it would have made a difference.

IMHO - Microsoft could have gone too ways. They could have gone full cash-cow, returned even more money to shareholders, and watched the franchise slowly shrink. (The IBM model, who seem to buy more shares back every year) Or they could have gone full-on towards R&D and killing their sacred cow with a better push into the post-PC world. In muddling between the two they did the worse of both worlds: they missed a tech wave, and punished their shareholders.

CurtHagenlocher• 13 years ago

What a silly claim. There's no question that the last decade at Microsoft is full of faulty assumptions and bad execution. But these memos as visionary? Feh!

1) 2005 is four years after Hailstorm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HailStorm) and already pretty late for a "services focus" to be forward-looking.

2) October 2010 is right about when Windows Phone 7 shipped, and therefore a year after the "reset" of the previous phone effort. At this point, "devices" is obvious to the point of "duh".

3) There's a world of difference between saying "X is important" and "X is important, therefore we should do Y".

asveikau5• 13 years ago

Interesting quote from Ozzie:

"The PC-centric/server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity,"

This is presented as an insight. There is so little context given here, so maybe I'm just missing something, but it sounds much more like bullshit to me.

What exactly is less complex about "post-PC" or "post traditional server"? On the client, minding battery life and constantly dealing with connection loss is much more complex than an always-powered, always-connected PC. On the server front, managing VM instances is in many ways more complex than just running a single server, or a smaller set of them. People add these complexities because they give them something in return. But it is adding complexity, let us not deny it.

I never followed Ozzie too deeply, but this style of throwing around programmer jargon to make an all-around "nothing" point seems to be his style. I still remember hearing him say something along the lines of "RSS is the Unix pipe of the web". I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt when I heard that, to stretch my mind somewhat to believe that is actually a thing... But let's face it, the analogy is nonsense.

webmaven• 13 years ago

What exactly is less complex about "post-PC" or "post traditional server"?

The API, mainly. Compare the size and cruftiness of the Windows API with the Android or iOS equivalents that a developer programs against.

asveikau5• 13 years ago

Not really buying it. First of all, you're just comparing desktop Windows with embedded versions of Linux and Mach/XNU. Secondly, the latter two systems are not exactly free of cruft and legacy either.

eulerphi2• 13 years ago

Apple was smart and basically repurposed the OSX API for ios. But they always had a good API. The original windows API is water trash. .Net is nice.

The only thing MS needs to do is go modern instead of legacy for their new phones, but is that going to happen?

jryle70• 13 years ago

Of course it doesn't get less complex. If anything the opposite is true. And that's precisely the point, if I got his points right.

The sheer complexity of modern computing devices and infrastructure, couple with the abundance of broadband Internet access, have resulted in the proliferation of "appliance-like" devices and cloud-based services. After all most of the time consumers want to view photos on their smartphone and not to deal with the file system. In the same vein, IT would rather fire up an EC2 instance than having to manage a physical server in their data center.

In my view, that's the gist of the post-PC/post-server centric world -- what on the surface today are pushed down to the inner layers, hidden away from users.

codeulike2• 13 years ago

Microsoft used to completely dominate everything, and now they dont, so people think they have 'failed' in some way. But if you look at their profits they're still making out like bandits. Over the last 5 years they've made a ton more money than everyone except Apple. So perhaps Microsoft did the right thing by not jumping in the direction Ozzie said straight away?

stats: https://twitter.com/janettu/status/380824535714377728

paganel• 13 years ago

I'm not a business analyst or anything related, but I think the issue is that in this day and age even huge profits don't mean a thing even when it comes to a business's future. Just look at Nokia, which was dominating its market 7-8 years ago, or Blackberry/RIM.

You really do have to be paranoid to survive, and the memos in the article are an example of that.

codeulike2• 13 years ago

We don't really know what a successful tech company looks like over longer than 5 or 10 years, because no-ones ever stayed dominant longer than that. Perhaps IBM is the only model - greatness that fades to a reasonable profitable longevity. Perhaps thats the only way to go long term?

jamesrcole2• 13 years ago

The fact that they're still making huge profits is also consistent with that being the result of the momentum of a slowly-dying behemoth.

I'm actually not trying to argue that this definitely is the case, I'm just saying those profits don't automatically support the case you're making.

jgreen10• 13 years ago

Is it? Do you have any examples?

badman_ting• 13 years ago

The iPhone is bigger than their whole business. I don't see how this can be anything other than a huge failure for MS. The PC market is declining year over year and all the growth is in mobile, an area where MS is a bit player. And they were in the smartphone and tablet markets way before Apple! How is this not a disaster?

RIM made money for a while too, but in the end they were doomed. I don't think that is true of MS, because they are just too big and do too many things. But people arguing that everything is OK because of the top line, I don't get.

cafard• 13 years ago

"While Ray Ozzie's time at Microsoft is widely regarded with disinterest by those Windows watchers who even remember him,"

They are not interested, or they are able to take a disinterested, i.e. impartial, view?

"it's clear now that the erstwhile Chief Software Architect was simply rowing against a tide of internal calcification."

Somehow I picture a lake of milk.

frankus• 13 years ago

Slightly OT, but in terms of "where are they now", Ozzie founded a (still stealth-mode) startup called Talko: http://www.talko.com.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/ray-ozzies-stealthy-startup...

programminggeek• 13 years ago

Ray Ozzie at least gave Microsoft Azure, which honestly if they didn't have that much at least they would be nowhere on the cloud. He was working on things like syncing files, email, office integration, etc.

Basically stuff like google docs, dropbox, heroku, etc. were all trying to be made in Microsoft's image under Ozzie and they all sort of ignored him. Now Microsoft is scrambling with SkyDrive, Office 365, Windows 8, Azure, etc.

Microsoft also pushed out J Allard who had vision to compete with iPad. His team was also responsible for Xbox and Zune. Between Xbox you get the blueprint of how to deliver services people love and evolve with over time. With Zune you got the beautiful Metro design that Microsoft finally embraced. The Zune player was pretty much the blueprint for this style and it was outstanding software for a Windows app.

Microsoft 20 years ago was about finding brilliant people and letting them build brilliant businesses under the Microsoft umbrella. At some point around 2000 the name of the game is to make all things Windows and Office and that kind of protectionism pretty much put Microsoft consistently 3-5 years behind in areas that matter like Search, Mobile, Services, Cloud Infrastructure because they couldn't see how that benefitted Windows and Office.

Rethinking Ray Ozzie

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