{"id":153,"date":"2005-11-09T13:54:16","date_gmt":"2005-11-09T20:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=153"},"modified":"2005-11-09T13:54:16","modified_gmt":"2005-11-09T20:54:16","slug":"ozzie_ascendant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Ozzie ascendant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ray Ozzie’s vision is now Microsoft’s vision. That may be the most important message of the “leaked” Microsoft memos<\/a> (I put “leaked” in quotes since it’s obvious, as John Battelle points out<\/a>, that these documents were intended to be made public from the get-go). Bill Gates’s memo is just a cover note to Ozzie’s agenda-setting memo. It’s Ozzie’s letter, Gates writes, “which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as [my] Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out.” That’s the sound of a baton – a very heavy baton – being passed.<\/p>\n

Gates’s desktop era is over. Ozzie’s internet era has begun. Up until now, Microsoft has looked at the internet through the desktop; now it’s looking at the desktop through the internet.<\/p>\n

Ozzie’s memo is very good. If you want an introduction to what’s often called “Web 2.0,” you could do worse than start with this document<\/a> – not least because it doesn’t use the term Web 2.0 at all. Three things leapt out at me:<\/p>\n

First, Ozzie seems to truly believe that the advertising model may be as lucrative for the software business as the licensing model has been. “In some cases,” he writes, “it may be possible for one to obtain more revenue through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model. Only in its earliest stages, no one yet knows the limits of what categories of hardware, software and services, in what markets, will ultimately be funded through this model. And no one yet knows how much of the world\u2019s online advertising revenues should or will flow to large software and service providers, medium sized or tail providers, or even users themselves.” Shifting away from the licensing model represents an enormous risk for Microsoft – a risk that could, under a worst-case scenario, prove fatal. It’s a risk that Ozzie doesn’t seem to shy away from.<\/p>\n

Second is Ozzie’s recognition that proprietary data formats, which have always been crucial to Microsoft’s success, may be turning into liabilities. He writes: “For all its tremendous innovation and its embracing of HTML and XML, Office is not yet the source of key web data formats \u2013 surely not to the level of PDF.” This, too, implies another fundamental break with Microsoft’s heritage.<\/p>\n

Third, and related, Ozzie explicitly embraces a truly open platform: “We\u2019ll design and license Windows and our services on terms that provide third parties with the same ability to benefit from the Windows platform that Microsoft\u2019s services enjoy. Our services innovations will include tight integration with the Windows client via documented interfaces, so that competing services can plug into Windows in the same manner as Microsoft\u2019s services.” Now, maybe this is just boilerplate to keep the lawyers happy. But I don’t think so. I think it’s another admission that the pillars of the old Microsoft are crumbling. They’ll hold for a bit longer, but in the meantime a new foundation needs to be poured.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ray Ozzie’s vision is now Microsoft’s vision. That may be the most important message of the “leaked” Microsoft memos (I put “leaked” in quotes since it’s obvious, as John Battelle points out, that these documents were intended to be made public from the get-go). Bill Gates’s memo is just a cover note to Ozzie’s agenda-setting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}