Innovation

Ray Ozzie's view from the clouds

In a lengthy interview, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie talked about clouds, lessons Microsoft learned from the recent Sidekick outage as well as why people are wrong to count Microsoft out of the smartphone race.

Written by Ina Fried, Contributor Nov. 17, 2009 at 9:32 p.m. PT

When Ray Ozzie penned his Internet Services Disruption memo back in 2005, he had a pretty good idea where the computing world was going. He just didn't know how Microsoft was going to get there.

While many are ready to write off Microsoft as an declining icon of computing's last generation, Ozzie sees Microsoft positioned to leapfrog some of the companies that tend to be thought of as the leaders of the cloud computing world--names like Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

"I will never, ever, utter the words 'mission accomplished' for obvious reasons," Ozzie said in an interview after his speech at the Professional Developers Conference. "But I'm really pleased with where things are."

It's been a tough journey, to be sure. But, Ozzie says Microsoft has changed in ways he could not have imagined. In particular, Ozzie points to Windows Azure--Microsoft's operating system in the clouds. Rather than just offer a set of services to move today's computing programs to remote servers, Ozzie says Azure is designed to handle the applications of tomorrow.

For more, read "Ray Ozzie's view from the clouds" on CNET News.

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Ray Ozzie's view from the clouds

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