Ray Ozzie Talking Mesh, Cloud Computing And More

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The Bill and Steve show along with Windows 7 is capturing much of the news at the moment on Techmeme but I was more interested in Ray Ozzie’s talk today. The webcast is now available and Mary Jo Foley has a good recap

Ray mentions that since he joined he spent much of his time on the cloud computing direction for Microsoft. As Vista and Office 2007 shipped, Ray has become more involved with those teams on future direction. Ray calls himself “the man behind the curtain". I sense he enjoys that role and doesn’t relish being as externally focused as BillG became. He will be keynoting at PDC though :)

He talks about his 3 principles per the latest memo

  1. The web is the hub of a device mesh and a mesh of people
  2. The power of choice (aka Software plus Services)
  3. Small pieces loosely joined

He also talks about the changing nature of an OS and Yahoo as an accelerator rather than a strategy which is something I’ve heard the execs reiterate over the last week. You can’t fault Ray for his consistency which is something we’ve not always been great at :)

One thing I like that Ray often reiterated is the extreme positions people take when a shift in the IT industry happens. He continues to point out that this is a common mistake observers make.