The Hindu Business Line : Ray Ozzie may be MS' Gate-way to future

The new boss
In the early 1980s, Mr Ozzie was involved in the development of the world's first spreadsheet tool.
Later he started Groove Networks, a company Mr Gates acquired a year ago.

Bangalore , June 18

On Friday came the announcement that Mr Bill Gates, the college kid, who thirty years ago, co-founded, what was to become the world's most influential computer company, was stepping down from a day-to-day role at Microsoft.

If almost no one is losing sleep over Mr Gates' decision that may in part be due to the comfort level that the name of Mr Gates' anointed successor as Chief Software Architect generates: Mr Ray Ozzie - now 50 years old like Mr Gates - is, like him, another iconic hero of the pre-Internet computer era.

In the early 1980s, Mr Ozzie was involved briefly in the development of the world's first spreadsheet tool, VisiCalc (short for visual calculator). Later at Lotus Development Corporation (whose own spread sheet programme, "1-2-3" became an industry leader), he was hailed as the father of Lotus Notes, a first of its kind collaborative tool. In 1997 he left Lotus, by which time IBM had acquired the company.

Road ahead

He started Groove Networks, a company whose road map in collaborative computing was so complementary to Microsoft's vision for its own future that Mr Gates acquired it just over a year ago.

Ironically, Microsoft's Excel has displaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the most used spreadsheet tool today.

Since then Mr Ozzie has been charting the road map for a new pay-as-per-use `on-demand' computing model called Windows Live.

This is expected to be the way services are delivered via Internet in the future. Mr Gates charted it in his book "The Road Ahead" - and Mr Ozzie seems to be the man of the moment at Microsoft to make it happen.

Earlier this year, at Orlando, Florida, this correspondent met Mr Ozzie briefly on the sidelines of IBM's Lotus Sphere annual conference.

"The very nature of work - and of workers - is changing," he said, "Children today do multi-tasking effortlessly. They move easily from e-mail to Instant Mail to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)." In fact e-mail is for messages from people you don't want to talk to: parents, teachers. For their own chosen friends, it's SMS and IM".

Mr Ozzie predicted during the course of an Innovators Panel: What kids do today, business will do tomorrow. It seems Microsoft is gearing up for the same game plan by identifying the guy who is their best bet to make it happen.

Change in scenario

The tapering-off of Mr Gates' role at Microsoft comes at an interesting time in the road map of computer technology: The personal computer era that Mr Gates and Mr Paul Allen helped kick start in 1975, when they created the Disk Operating System (DOS) software for the IBM PC, is seen to slowly wane, giving way to a new age when `connected', Internet-driven devices and services are set to rule.

While Microsoft's hold on the PC business continues to be strong, thanks to 8 of 10 PCs worldwide still running a flavour of its Windows software, the company may face increasing pressure from players like Google, Yahoo and the whole arena of non-proprietary "Free and Open" software

Reinventing itself

This may need Microsoft to re-invent itself. The scenario that sees it slowly learning to adjust to an era of Open Source dominance is by no means far fetched and being the canny technocrat he is, Mr Gates might well be preparing his company to co-exist with, if not embrace, the new `garam hawa' whose first hot breadth is Linux.

The next edition of Windows has been postponed a few times and is now due to appear early in 2007.

A public beta or trial version of the "Office" suite was unveiled in India only last week.