After a few years of trying to fill Bill Gates’ shoes as Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie is starting to hit his stride. In a remarkable strategy memo to employees (embedded below), Ozzie essentially shifts Microsoft’s mission from one of creating software for the PC and stand-alone servers to creating an interconnecting mesh between devices and people. He is not abandoning Windows or Office, but he is saying that the value of Microsoft’s software will increasingly depend less on what it can do on its own than what it can do with others. It is not about software anymore so much as it is about Web-based services. Ray, welcome to the club.
Excerpt:
Central to this strategy is our embrace of both a world of the web and a world of devices. Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences – experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.
Guiding Principles
There are three overarching principles guiding our services strategy – principles informing the design and development of products being implemented across all parts of Microsoft, for both individuals and business.1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.
The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. . . . All applications will grow to recognize and utilize the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View. . . . To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices – a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole.
2. The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud.
Most major enterprises are in the early stages of a significant infrastructural transition – from the use of dedicated and sometimes very expensive application servers, to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware to consolidate those enterprise applications on computing and storage grids constructed within their data center. . . . Driven in large part by the high-scale requirements of consumer services, the value of this utility computing model is most clearly evident in cloud-based internet services.
Software built explicitly to provide a significant level of server/service symmetry will afford choice and flexibility in developing, operating, migrating and managing such systems in highly varied enterprise deployment environments that are distributed and federated between the enterprise data center and the internet cloud.
3.Small Pieces Loosely Joined for developers, within the cloud and across a world of devices.
Application design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems, where standards and interoperability are essential. . . . At a higher level, myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility. Developers will need to build applications that can be delivered seamlessly across a loosely coupled device mesh by utilizing a common set of tools, languages, runtimes and frameworks – a common toolset that spans from the service in the cloud to enterprise server, and from the PC to the browser to the phone.
Here is the full memo:
(Photo by Dan Farber).
Cool. I think I will wait until someone else creates a mesh like Microsoft’s, but ten times better.
MyMesh.com tries to be more social and more interoperable. Already signing up beta users..
What’s with all the flash PDF/PowerPoint embeds recently? Those things are obnoxious.
Erick, PLEASE post a real PDF. This flash stuff is unusable. It’s like reading a book on a cell phone. It’s really, really annoying. Thank you.
Surely Bill Gates considered this years ago…
BUT…
Bandwidth, processor speed and RAM had to improve before this dream could become a practical reality.
Dear Microsoft,
Welcome to the web. It is a wonderful way of delivering and sharing services that are useful to users of personal computers, macintosh’s (sp?), and cell phones. We hope that you enjoy making software that all users can enjoy.
Best Regards,
Longtime Friend of PC
Facebook’s new Facebook Chat just went live at 2:40ish CST…
I think Ray Ozzie is a big stud, and this announcement is a big deal. It was previewed to great applause at Mix. What I find so interesting about this announcement today is that it occurs so closely on the heels of the Yahoo earnings announcement.
Who thinks that was an accident? I don’t.
If I were a Yahoo shareholder, could spell “the internet,” and I saw this type of leadership from Ozzie, I’d sure wonder why my management team wouldn’t even meet with MSFT to discuss this…
Mark my words: Live Mesh is a great technical strategy, announced in a tactically brilliant way to push the Yahoo deal to the next level…
Now this makes sense! Interoperability Thin Clients!
Good morning Micky!
Welcome to 5 years ago Microsoft.
Sometimes, Microsoft does bring in some good ideas but most of the time they lack of the “X” factor to really harness those ideas. I guess it’s still very corporate+mechanical culture in the company. People love organic stuffs.
GAH!
For the last time software is not dead.
I do NOT want to run Adobe Photoshop on the web thank you very much.
Hey TechCruch,
Ray Ozzie and others at Microsoft have been writing (and working) on this stuff as well as evangelising and madating it across Microsoft since 2003!!! So, this is OLD news.
I suggest that you read this and, at the end of each principle, add the sentence, “…but, remember folks, it’s got to make MONEY!”
Linked Data will be the next big Web driver over the next five years and Live Mesh is Microsoft’s own play in this new arena.
It is still early days yet for Microsoft, but with Google setting up all kinds of Cloud Services, Microsoft has been forced to enter into this Cloud Arena.
Live Mesh is a good start, but there is no way Microsoft will place any of their huge revenue earners like Windows and Office into this Mesh, until they can find a perfect business model.
If Microsoft don’t get this right very soon, then Live Mesh could become a Live Mess.
Interesting. I just got out of the keynote presentation from Steve Ballmer at MIX08 Italy here in Milan. While he certain referenced Mesh, his message was that the future will be a mixture of “software and services”. The message he delivered would have disagreed entirely with your “software is dead” headline. And based on a cursory review of Ozzie’s memo, I don’t think he said that. Microsoft is (belatedly and perhaps begrudgingly) recognizing that the Web will be the primary platform for software (as a service), but it will not be the only platform. Even if the plethora of devices we have eventually converge to a common platform, software will still need to be developed for that platform and even (egads!) the PC OS. To paraphrase an earlier commenter, I think it will be quite sometime before SaaS performs well enough that I will want Photoshop to be delivered on a Web platform instead of the OS platform.
spot on – M’Soft is on its way to become web giant – if really arries this vision.
Here Come the Thin Clients {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/mATeVGyCvM_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Here Come the Thin Clients ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/zrnEBHRaGG”}}}
net effect…. increasing our vulnerability to the whims of isp’s, and who controls them (governments, corporations) by a huge factor
…. broadband capacity limitations, think everybody on streaming hd video AND “the cloud” AND whatever is next
-> “Erick, PLEASE post a real PDF. This flash stuff is unusable. It’s like reading a book on a cell phone. It’s really, really annoying. Thank you.”
Yes but a *real* PDF would mean using *real* apps not TOYS.
WEB 2.0 : be excited about technology that was possible on 386 … how many years ago ??
This is depressing.
Erick I think you really miss the point off Mesh. Software is anything BUT dead if this thing is successful.
Is that title your invention? Or, did he actually say that in the memo. If you made up the title based on the memo, shame on tech crunch for again stooping to the level of valleywag.
Note: it is possible to download the pdf through scribd -click on the round yellow button and you’ll be taken to the scribd website, where you can click on download and then login and then get the document.
Yeah, too many steps. How hard would it be to offer both the scribd preview and the actual download?
#5> Surely Bill Gates considered this years ago…
Yes, he did. Back at the 1997 (I think) PDC in San Diego he talked about many of those ideas. Bill made it sound like it was coming “next year.”
It just took a little bit longer than he expected.
Too little too late Mr Ozzie
M$ has been strangling and choking the web for years until they got in a position to abuse it with a monopolistic strategy?
Fuck no, we don’t want M$ touching our web!
It is like giving a pedophile free pass to a kindergarten.
Keep M$ out of the web!!!
Sadly, Ozzie’s Guiding Principles leave out the most important one:
“If People Don’t Trust You, They’ll Ignore You”
M$FT’s legacy of jerking developers, companies, and customers around for the last 25 years is going to be a real impediment to playing in the open/social software world.
“It is our mission in this new era to create compelling, seamless experiences that combine the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices”.
-Ray Ozzie
… the verbatim paragraph immediately following the first paragraph of the his memo quoted above, immediately preceding the ‘Guiding Principles’, and somehow omitted here
I’m a TechCrunch fan, but this omitted content sandwiched directly between the quoted content seems a glaring mismatch with the unfortunate title of this post.
Software is dead? I thought he said it was magic. And that it was their mission to use it to create compelling experiences on both the web AND in a myriad of devices.
That sucks that software is dead. How this doesn’t kill the web (which runs on software) at the same time is remarkable.
21 is right! I don’t think you are getting the mesh at all. This thing might be the only way for ms to someday transition from desktop heavy apps to web services but it VERY clearly doesn’t rely on software being as dead as this post seems to think it does.
Despite techcrunch’s delusional belief that no one buys desktop Office anymore the average user is going to still be using it 5 years from now *especially* if this thing takes off. Data is accessed through the cloud and you can use apps over it but they are desktop apps not web based services! They are treading the line rather than busting over it but that probably makes sense. The last survey I saw made it clear that most people don’t care or understand google docs and its like and so far, gears, which could help out, is as lame as MS online office is. (Remember how gears + docs was going to REALLY, this time for sure, mean the end of Office? Why was that anyway if the cloud is really where it’s at?) The most interesting idea here is the change in software licensing from machine based to “mesh” based. Which you appear, not surprisingly, to pass over entirely since they are still talking about….software.
If Techcrunch doesn’t make an effort to change *everything* today into something else tomorrow, they don’t have a job tomorrow. Right now, software must die so they can blog about it and say, “we told you so.” Tomorrow, who knows what it’ll be? Think about that when you read TC. If there is even a hint of opinion in a TC post, an agenda is certainly at hand.
What i think many people forget is that Microsoft talking about web services for the first time 10 years ago with its Hailstorm paper. Out of Hailstorm and the concept of loosely coupled web services in the sky came the Microsoft’s work on AJAX. Remember folks, MSFT invented AJAX! I think this is a great announcement, as it prooves that they are willing to eat their own children (Windows) to ensure they are relevant in the future. IBM were the opposite..they saw the rich client/PC wave coming and stuck with their monolitic mainframes ways….At least MS has some vision here….The guns of Redmond are slowly turning!
@ JJamison:
“If I were a Yahoo shareholder, could spell “the internet,” and I saw this type of leadership from Ozzie, I’d sure wonder why my management team wouldn’t even meet with MSFT to discuss this…”
That’s exactly the problem – Bal(d)mer is running the good ship Microsoft, not Ozzie. Bill was famous for “inventing” Microsoft, Ozzie is famous for inventing Notes and Groove, and Bal(d)mer is famous for throwing a chair across a room and sweating profusely on-camera.
I consider myself a huge Microsoft and Yahoo! cheerleader (the former for their software, the latter for their portal, services, and YUI Library), but *neither* of them currently have “geek cred,” though Jerry is slowly restoring Yahoo’s; Bal(d)mer leaves me totally cold. And for someone who’s hairline has been receding since he turned 18, that’s saying something.
why is it that ozzy looks like a certain someone here
http://lonestar...ges/hitler7.jpg