Parsing Ray OzzieParsing Ray Ozzie

I listened last week to Ray Ozzie's plan to drag Microsoft into the 21st century of Web software. Ozzie was open, thoughtful, and mostly convincing, but there was nuance in his message, too. Here are excerpts of what Ozzie said -- and my interpretation of what he meant.Ozzie, of course, is Microsoft's chief software architect. Let's start by parsing that title, which he inherited from Bill Gates in June of 2006. Frankly, chief software architect sounds like an outdated job description for the person responsible for transitioning Microsoft's product line into the software-plus-services era. More appropriate would be chief software-plus-services architect or, better, chief software de-architect.

Attendees at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles got an earful of Ozzie. He gave two keynote presentations, amounting to some 7,000 words of product and strategy overview, though the word "Vista" crossed his lips only once. This was about the promising future of Windows, not its uninspiring present.

After his second PDC keynote, Ozzie sat down with information. The following sound bites were drawn from both his public presentations and our in-person interview.

Ozzie: Some months after we began to plan this new effort, Amazon launched a service called EC2, and I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their innovation and for the fact that across the industry all of us are going to be standing on their shoulders as they've established some base-level design patterns, architectural models and business models that we'll all learn from and grow.

Translation: Microsoft actually started down this path first. Amazon beat us to the punch on the marketing side, but their cloud services aren't very sophisticated.

Ozzie: Windows Azure is being released today as a Community Technology Preview with the initial features being only a fraction of where you'll see from our road map that it will be going.

Translation: Windows Azure is still months away. Stay tuned.

Ozzie: Unlike traditional OSes that manage just a single machine, Windows Azure as an operating system for the cloud manages the entire global data center infrastructure.

Translation: This is the biggest and most complex technical challenge we've ever tackled. Wish us luck.

Ozzie: The services and the service model that you'll be playing with are still pretty early, and, yes, we're going to be intentionally conservative in the progressive nature of how we're going to be rolling this all out.

Translation: We're being both conservative and progressive in rolling out the Azure Services Platform. Kind of like jumbo shrimp.

Ozzie: We've barely scratched the surface of how the Web can improve the value of our investments in our PCs. If you take one thing away from what you see here today at PDC, it's that we can do our customers a great service by focusing on how we can give them the most combined value of their investments.

Translation: Don't abandon PC software. I'm begging you.

Ozzie: We showed some nascent but important back-end infrastructure, design patterns, and models that are aspiring to be the basis for our horizontally scaled systems of the next 50 years.

Translation: This is a long-term play. If we screw up, our grandchildren can straighten it out. Ha!

Ozzie: My recommendation to every enterprise worldwide would be to put a small number of seats of Exchange online or SharePoint online . . . It will give you the ability to start knowing what you don't know.

Translation: Cloud computing isn't as easy as it sounds, and you're about to feel the pain.

Ozzie: Any new effort, if you don't start in the range of, I'll say, 10 to 50 people, you're throwing too many people on the project too soon. We're in the broadening-out phase right now.

Translation: Microsoft's cloud computing initiative has been a skunk works project so far.

So, there you have it: the unauthorized guide to Ray Ozzie at PDC 2008. In fairness to Ozzie, I would point anyone who's interested in hearing his unfiltered message in its proper context to the full transcripts. You can find his Day One keynote here, his Day Two keynote here, and our Q&A here.

Despite my tongue-in-cheek portrayal, I find myself agreeing with Ozzie on multiple points--that cloud computing really is different from hosting models of the past, and that on-premises PCs and servers will continue to play key roles in a world of cloud computing. More on that in a later post.