Ray Ozzie - Microsoft's

When Bill Gates announced his retirement to the backstage, he took Ray Ozzie to become Microsoft's chief architect. What about this character makes the president of the world's largest software group decide to be his replacement?

Ozzie's management style is different from Gates' "prove me wrong, or get out of here". Ozzie is a patient, somewhat egalitarian and open to others' suggestions.

But the factor that made him Gates' number one choice was his deep understanding of what the Microsoft founder always admired since the two of them knew each other. Ozzie is the father of the Lotus Notes application in the early 80s. Currently Notes has been upgraded to version 8 under IBM's management.

" Ozzie is able to foresee the future for about 5 years or more, " said Peter O'Kelly, research director at Burton Group, a market analysis firm. " I never imagined a Microsoft missing Bill Gates, but Ozzie would be a reasonable replacement ."

The way to conquer technology

Ray Ozzie was born on November 20, 1955 on the outskirts of Chicago (USA). He graduated from Illinois Urbana-Champaign University with a degree in computer science in 1979. When he was a student, he built Plato system with many similar features of later Notes application, including "forum online, notifications, e-mail, chatrooms, instant messages and multiplayer games ".

After graduation, he worked for Jonathan Sachs at the maker of Data General computers. In 1982, Ozzie developed Notes software with the ambition of establishing its own company. But a year later, Sachs convinced him to join Lotus Symphony and they made a lot of money thanks to IBM PC compatible Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. Lotus 1-2-3 quickly dominates the enterprise application market and is a key program on Windows pre-systems.

In 1984, Ozzie left Lotus and founded Iris Associates to expand the Notes application. When the new product appeared in 1989, Lotus Company sold it under the name Lotus Notes. Lotus and Iris were merged into IBM in 1995.

Ozzie continues to build Groove Networks collaboration and messaging in 1997 based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. This is also a product that uses XML - one of Bill Gates' major concerns.

About 6 months after he joined Microsoft, Ozzie wrote a long memorandum stating that the corporation needed to switch to a "software-bundled service" business soon (Ozzie uses " software plus services " instead of " SaaS - software as a service " to be available in the market.

Ozzie's October 2005 memo once again urged Microsoft to change because of the XML format (available in Office 2007) that did not reach Adobe's (PDF) Portable Document Format. He also criticized management for missing the opportunity to develop Internet telephony (VoIP) technology like Skype. In addition, although Microsoft plays an important role in expanding AJAX, they are not the leading company in building applications based on that technology combination.

Since this memorandum, Microsoft has focused more on launching online services under the Live project, most recently the Silverlight content transfer technology.

Step by step, Ozzie becomes a smart leader, an innovative product specialist and a person who can see macro issues. " It must be said that Ozzie changed Microsoft more than Microsoft changed Ozzie, " said Dwight Davis, deputy director of research firm Ovum.

Difficulties ahead

Currently, Ozzie is facing major challenges with Microsoft, typically the Office office suite. This is a high-profit "dairy cow" for the company, but it now faces competition from Google and OpenOffice.org. Microsoft was forced to come up with a new strategy: Free Works package, but users had to accept advertising when using the product.

Ozzie also needs to plan for development and introduction of software upgrades. For example, in February 2008, Microsoft will have to release new versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio. Besides, he is also responsible for deploying Live project to realize the vision of "software accompanying services".

However, until now, Microsoft has not had a complete product development architecture and roadmap. Ozzie also rarely appears in the press and often avoids being the focus of big events.

" Ozzie can't stand in the corner forever. Microsoft needs a tech-savvy person who can represent an entire corporation, " said Mary Jo Foley, owner of All About Microsoft.