Microsoft's Ray Ozzie talks cloud computing at Churchill Club

I've been a pretty vocal critic of Microsoft in the past, scratching my head in amazement when the company does something wacky like a Jerry Seinfeld-Bill Gates commercial or Windows Vista. But after a Churchill Club dinner in Silicon Valley last night, I think have a better understanding of what's happening over in Redmond.

Microsoft is a massive operation that's involves a lot of people in a lot of different cities working on a lot of different products and services for a lot of different types of customers. You don't just walk in there and change the culture, the way of thinking or the karma overnight. Change comes slowly and from different avenues. Like a big ship, you turn it slowly.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect and the guest speaker at last night's dinner (Techmeme), said the company wasn't necessarily talking or thinking about the cloud when he came on board as part of the acquisition of his company, called Groove Networks, in 2005. When it came time to start offering a new way of thinking about the cloud and software, the approach came slowly. At the event, he said:

In any large organization, the government, the military, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, change of management is a challenge. You cannot effect change by mandate. You can't say this is the way it's gonna be and everyone snaps.

Speaking at any event where the topic has to do with cloud computing means that you inevitably are asked to define cloud computing. Clearly, Ozzie must have given a lot of thought to a definition for the cloud but he actually may have given it too much thought. While not quite as babbling as Sen. Ted Stevens' explanation of how the Internet works (remember the "series of tubes?"), Ozzie's definition of cloud computing was definitely worthy of a "huh?" head shake.

...self-service on-demand way of accessing resources with a virtualized abstraction that is relatively homogeneous

Wow. That's a mouthful. But it also goes to show that even someone like the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft struggles with a way to define the cloud. Still, he spoke highly of the work that Microsoft does in the cloud environment, as well as on the client side, to meet the changing needs of all types of customers, from consumers to large enterprise.

As for the non-cloud discussions during the event, Ozzie seemed to become anxious when asked about mobile phones. Clearly, something is on the way as he prefaced his response by saying that he wouldn't discuss dates or features and then quickly shifted to note that Windows Mobile is being refreshed and that it will include features that will let phone manufacturers do more. It's a competitive market, he said, and no longer will touch screens, media players or app stores be differentiators. It will take more than that.

He also took a moment to talk about the competition, notably Google's announcement of Wave, a modern-day approach to organizing e-mail, IM and other online communications. Given his background with Lotus Notes and his interest in collaboration tools, Ozzie was actually very complimentary toward Google for undertaking such a mighty task. Still, he criticized Wave as being "anti-Web" because of its complexity that's involved with it.

The Web, he said, is supposed to bring simplicity to our lives. Ironically, this comes from a giant company that finds itself playing catch up on cloud initiatives, in part, because of the complexity that is Microsoft.