Ray Ozzie's Latest Memo (Dawn of a New Day)

This memo (blogpost) is a good follow-up to Ray Ozzie's earlier memo from 2005.  I urge you to take a look at this and reflect on the message.... What key ideas do you take away as they relate to IT strategy?

Surprising Leadership Change at Microsoft

It was announced today that Ray Ozzie, the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, is leaving the company. In a memo to employees, Steve Balmer reported that he will be moving into the entertainment space. The only other person to have held this position is Bill Gates himself, and it has been announced they will not fill the position again.

Ozzie worked at Microsoft for only five years. As we all remember, he wrote his very influential memo on Internet Disruption. Since that time, he has been focusing primarily on Microsoft's cloud initiative. It is interesting to see him departing before that product has really been launched and taken off. For someone who saw this as the future of not only Microsoft, but for the IT industry, I am surprised to see him depart before his vision comes to fruition.

It makes me wonder if there are mixed thoughts on the future of the cloud, even at the highest levels of Microsoft. This could be the first evidence that the "three screens and a cloud" idea are not as simple, or realstic, as some have thought. Considering the stock dropped over 2% on the news, my guess is that many investors are also in doubt.

Expanding the Facebook & Microsoft Partnership

On Wednesday, Facebook and Microsoft jointly announced new "social" functionality within the Bing search engine.

This is a really interesting development which highlights the value of Microsoft's stake in Facebook and Facebook's desire to move beyond social networking. This is another example of the "Facebook layer" which I blogged about previously.

By adding personalized search results based on users' Facebook connections, Bing is narrowing the results in hopes that it will enable users to get to the information they are seeking more quickly. Also (and I admittedly not certain whether this is a new feature), if you search for a person on Bing now, next to the search result related to that individual's Facebook profile, there is an option to add this person as a friend directly from Bing.

It will be interesting to see whether this enhanced user customization enables Bing to eat into some of Google's market share.

AT&T is counting on Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 devices

AT&T is scrambling to find a new partner since its exclusivity contract with Apple for iphone is set to expire this coming January. What better place to look than a rival?

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system will not use the standard user interface of icons that launch applications, this OS will use dynamic tiles which they hope will be intuitive and easy to use. There will be several functionalities that we are used to: a social networking hub and a camera and some that are more advanced than the usual games on the pc like solitaire. This phone has more advanced gaming options, allowing XBox Live owners to access their accounts as an example.

It will also be more integrated with Office but will oddly not have the copy/ paste function.

Although MS is continually trying to update and improve their phone OS, it is unlikely that they will capture the hearts of iphone or blackberry users, especially with the launch of Android phones.

As an owner of a windows phone, I'm delighted that they are scrapping the old OS, because let me tell you, it has left me disappointed.

Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon EC2

www.networkworld.com/news/2010/062510-microsoft-azure-amazon-ec2.html

Amazon currently offers infrastructure-as-a-service while Microsoft's Azure is a platform-as-a-service model. This article discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different models. It also suggests that in the near future the two different companies will converge toward eachother.

Microsoft's COO, Kevin Turner briefly discussed and dismissed Amazon's infrastructure as a service model during the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2010. "It only provides a limited set of platform, as a service set of capabilities, in virtual machines that you manage with Amazon, that you maintain and update."

Microsoft Has No Plans To Make Another Smartphone, Exec Says

From Steve Ballmer’s speech on November 4, 2009, I found Microsoft is very clear about the trend of cloud computing and how television, mobiles, and personal computer would be integrated to this trend. While Microsoft is the first company among these three to touch into the mobile market, its early vision seems doesn’t help it even to stay in this market. A recent article published in WSJ Blog by Jeanette Borzo claims that Microsoft Has No Plans to make another Smartphone, according to Microsoft executives.

Microsoft is going to stick to core businesses and has no plans to develop a new Smartphone device, such as its ill-starred Kin handsets, the chief financial officer of Microsoft’s mobile-communication business said Thursday. While Apple is enjoying its huge success of the latest iPhone 4 and Google’s Android operating system continues to win popularity with consumers, Microsoft seems still didn’t show how it will deal with mobile market and how to save the windows mobile system. It is the similar case for its Bing and Live services. Even though both of these attempts show Microsoft’s resolution to compete with Google on cloud services, their strategy is much less clear than Google or even Apple. Microsoft claims to stick to its core business, but maybe that's not enough for it to compete with Google.