Ray Ozzie – Moses or Pied Piper?

The number of articles concerning the changes at Microsoft gets larger each day. with the end of this month defining the end of an era, it seems that he question of whether Ray Ozzie, the man designated to guide the ship, can bring Microsoft out of the doldrums that began with the late release of Vista and continued with the many error laden updates for all of the company’s software.

In an article in NetworkWorld, the assumption is still put forth that the path that Ozzie designated a few months ago will still be the direction taken. That path is to remove some of the computing from local desktops, relocating it to the mystical realm of the ‘network cloud’.

This doesn’t seem to be any problem for the author of the article, as the changes are arranged in a neat procession for the reader. The problem with this, and possibly a very large problem for a company like Microsoft, is that the developments of the last few weeks signal a time of metered access to the Internet.

While metered access to ‘the cloud’ may be a minor annoyance to the home crowd, it will stifle the corporate user, as these machines will rack up huge costs as megabyte after megabyte is moved around in the course of the business day. This metered usage will negate much if not all the savings of the removal of local storage, and software-as-a-service.

This entire plan, with its fine details, is exactly what the large corporation faces continuously, inertia. Once a plan has been started, it becomes difficult to maneuver through small changes needed to avoid trouble when the market changes.

Ray Ozzie is someone who has always thought big – he was the creator of Lotus Notes. He developed Groove before his company was purchased by Microsoft. Will he be able to move nimbly through the changes occurring daily, to keep the Microsoft ship from running aground? The company is being pressured from all sides to compete with Google, seen as the de facto rival. Reports of the Windows juggernaut being overtaken by Google’s advertising dollars by the year 2009 must frighten those in Redmond who share the siege mentality of Bill Gates.

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