I was wondering why Ray Ozzie decided to add me on Twitter on January 3. Now I know.
“What a fantastic year it was. On to the next adventure,” Ozzie tweeted at the end of January 4.
The full story (as much as we know about it at this point) is on Boston.com. Ozzie is a founder of stealth startup Cocomo, which is in the process of being “boogstrapped with a few folks that I’ve worked with before,” Ozzie told Boston.com.
“It seems that former Microsoft executive Matt Pope is also a co-founder of Cocomo. Ransom Richardson, another ex-Microsoftie based in Boston, is also part of the team,” according to that story.
Ozzie, as Microsoft historians may recall, stepped down as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft in October 2010. (Supposedly, he was under a one-year non-compete, hence his recent reappearance.)
Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 and penned one of the most forward-looking memos in the company’s history (his “Internet Services Disruption” memo.) After that, he went quiet and made very few public appearances. He did, however, have some major influence on a number of teams at Microsoft, including the Azure team, the FUSE Labs team, and the Live Mesh team. Ozzie’s exit memo on the “post-PC world” is worth a read, too.
Before being “acquired” by Microsoft, Ozzie founded Groove Networks. And before that, he invented Lotus Notes.
Update: Here’s a job opening for “lead UX/UI designer” at Cocomo, in case anyone’s interested. (Thanks @TheRomit).
