Speaking yesterday at the Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft’s (s msft) Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie explained what’s really important when it comes to the smartphone business, and it’s apparently nothing at all to do with the number of apps available on any one platform.

All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them. It’s a completely different situation from the PC market, where software’s built to run on a Windows or a Mac. Mobile apps require very little development, so it’s much easier to bring them onto every platform.

Yeah. That’s why there are more than 100,000 apps in the iTunes Store and, what, five in the Windows Marketplace? And that’s why quality apps like Facebook or Tweetie 2.0 have been ported, feature-complete, from the iPhone to Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Palm OS? Oh, wait…

The point here is that Microsoft’s senior execs apparently continue to misunderstand what’s going on in todays smartphone market. Microsoft seems to view the iPhone not as a serious competitor but more as a toy, something to disregard because grown-ups (grey-suited corporate drones) aren’t interested in all that flashy functionality and rich media. They’re not interested in the astonishing range of software available for the iPhone. They just want Mobile Powerpoint and Excel, plus a few other ageing Office apps. That’s all that really matters, right?

Wrong. We need look no further than JD Power’s recently published results of a satisfaction survey they conducted of business smartphone customers around the world. Apple came in at number one, RIM finished second.

WIRED’s Gadget Lab published an article yesterday examining some of the mistakes Microsoft has made with Windows Mobile. NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin told WIRED:

Microsoft’s mobile OS history is rooted in personal digital assistants, which were marketed toward enterprise audiences. Today, the smartphone has shifted into the mainstream as a consumer device, and yet Windows Mobile is still largely focused on enterprise features.

Perhaps Microsoft has a significant change planned for the release of Windows Mobile 7, WIRED’s Brian Chen asked Redmond HQ. They declined to discuss Windows 7 directly, but did have this to say about their mobile OS business;

The company’s mobility strategy has not changed; it is and has always been to provide a software platform for the industry. The company works closely with many mobile operators and device makers around the world because people want different experiences on a variety of phones.

Well, it’s certainly a different experience alright. A lousy one. That’s one reason Microsoft’s global smartphone market share has dropped from 11 percent in 2008 to 7.9 percent today. In the meantime, Apple and RIM have seen their market shares swell to 17.1 and 20.8 percent, respectively.

Microsoft’s Mobile strategy is out of touch. Ever-increasing numbers of enterprise customers who once used Windows phones are today carrying Blackberrys or iPhones and have entirely different expectations of their cellular devices. Mobile Outlook just won’t cut it any more.

Hopping Mad

Driving the point home is a timely article published this week by the Wall Street Journal, about the disparity between old, primitive tech used in the office, and the far more capable and empowering technology found at home. According to the WSJ’s Nick Wingfield, execs at Kraft Foods noticed the difference.

Executives began to worry that the company’s technology policies were preventing employees from staying in step with trends. Kraft was a consumer company, they figured, so workers needed to be more familiar with the technologies that consumers were using, whether the iPhone or YouTube.

So, the IT department stopped blocking access to consumer Web sites, and the company started a stipend program for smart phones: Workers get an allowance every 18 months to buy a phone of their choosing. (Over 60% picked iPhones.)

With all the above in mind, I can’t see how Microsoft’s Mobile strategy could be considered sound business. If I were a Microsoft shareholder, I’d be hopping mad at the company’s apparent inability to understand — and adapt to — the demands of today’s smartphone consumers.

It’s paradoxical, really. Microsoft has always highlighted how customer choice is of paramount importance, indeed, a key component in its success with Windows. In the quote above, Microsoft’s own spokesperson stresses how Microsoft works with mobile operators and OEM’s to provide choice. But at the PDC yesterday, Ozzie seemed to be saying that an impressive selection of apps (ie. choice) is unimportant. He mentions “apps that count” but doesn’t say what those apps are; in any case, that’s a short-sighted assertion. Apps that matter to me, may not matter so much to you. That’s precisely why an iPhone owner’s home screen is so fascinating to other iPhone owners.

The iPhone’s greatest strength is the tens of thousands of software titles available in the App Store, usually at a knock-down price. There is, literally, something for everyone, no matter how discerning ones’ taste in Games, Productivity tools, or fart apps.

I give Windows Mobile another year, max. If it can’t build its app marketplace into a substantial repository of quality titles at (very) low prices, it won’t matter how closely Microsoft works with its technology partners. Because, at that point, Windows Mobile will be reduced to a Wikipedia entry as an “also ran” in the history of the smartphone.

There’s a lot going on at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC 09); it’s a traditional launchpad for cool new stuff. I thought I’d point out several of the government-relevant announcements and technology roll-outs.

I specifically want to spotlight something called Codename Dallas, and how NASA and others have begun using it. In the keynote this morning Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told PDC attendees (and his streaming-video audience) that a landslide of new sensors and observational systems are changing the world by recording “unimaginable volumes of data… But this data does no good unless we turn the potential into the kenetic, unless we unlock it and innovate in the realm of applications and solutions that’s wrapped around that data.”

Here’s how we’re addressing that, with a bit of step-by-step context on the overall cloud-computing platform enabling it.  The steps are: 1. Azure, 2. Pinpoint, and 3. Dallas.

Today is the big public roll-out of the Windows Azure Platform for cloud computing and a full complement of new services for it,  including a Java SDK, REST and open source support and interoperability with MySQL, Tomcat, memcached, and even PHP development with Eclipse. The Windows Azure site is here, or just check out a brief summary of today’s Azure announcement and its array of cloud services. 

As part of the Windows Azure rollout, we’re announcing the new Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications.  It includes an “app store,” as well as store-like shopping for experts and professional IT services. Pinpoint is open to everyone, and free to join, and is already at launch the largest directory of qualified IT providers and their software built on Microsoft technologies. The app store alone is cool, as you can try, buy, and download software through direct links to software purchase pages, demos, and trial downloads.

One of the featured sets of services available through Pinpoint is our Codename “Dallas” service, Microsoft’s Information Services business, which developers and information workers can use to find and manage Web services and datasets  – free or paid – to power their apps, on any platform. Dallas is built completely on the Windows Azure cloud platform, which includes a SQL Azure cloud database, so you get the ability to store structured and unstructured data whether from Dallas’s “data-as-a-service” or your own collections, to invoke and examine the data without having to parse it, to use REST services to manipulate and move the data, and to analyze the data using the new PowerPivot high-end analytics for Excel 2010 spreadsheets, for example.

Large-scale datasets already available through Dallas include government, financial, weather, news, corporate, international and reference sets including those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, Data.gov, ESRI, First American Corp., infoUSA.com Inc., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations, WaveMarket Inc. and Weather Central Inc. Starting today, “Dallas” is available as a limited community technology preview (CTP). 

Tech news sites are already reporting the “competitive drive” propelling Dallas, for example The Register puts it this way: 

Microsoft Dallas Muscles Google Data Crusade: Microsoft is hoping to out-Google Google by unlocking the world’s information and slapping a GUI on the front end. Today, the company unveiled Dallas, which chief software architect Ray Ozzie said would deliver “data as a service.” He described it as a “game changing” subsystem of Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing and storage service.

There’s a lot you  can do with a data platform like that. The federal government’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra moments ago addressed PDC 09 live via remote video and announced that the U.S. government has been busy building new capabilities using Dallas and the Azure cloud, and he showed a very neat example: the NASA “Be a Martian” site. From the detailed press release:

Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.

The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.

“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.” [emphasis added]

So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls “small pieces loosely joined.”

There’s more coming this week that I believe government folks will like, including one of my favorite projects: Thursday’s unveiling of the Microsoft Semantic Engine.  My team back at my old government hangout did a lot of pathbreaking semantic-analysis research and development, and I hope that they will find this very cool stuff indeed. Not allowed to say more yet -  though I see that others in semantic-web circles are eager to hear more. Stay tuned!

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Today’s keynote is with Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia and we expect Microsoft to announce an Internet Explorer 9 technology preview as part of the keynote announcements. We’ve teamed up with a number of well known Microsoft bloggers to blog the Day 1 and Day 2 keynotes. The live blogging will include Ed Bott, Kip Kniskern, Long Zheng, Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera and myself Tom Warren.

E <http://agilecat.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/microsoft-pdc09-keynote-1-wrapping-up/>

Tim O'Reilly, Ray Ozzie

Tim O’Reilly created a bit of a stir last night in the tech world by writing a thoughtful essay entitled “The War for the Web.” He’ll be expanding on his thoughts in his keynote address today at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. From the essay, here’s the core argument:

“[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. [emphasis added] Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

… P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

The coda there, with the Microsoft prediction, is what fascinated me – so much so that I mentioned it on Twitter. Tim immmediately responded, “Thanks. I should write a followup explaining the logic that got me to the PS.”  While we wait for that, though, here’s my prediction – with a bit of inside knowledge – today Microsoft begins to live up to Tim’s expectations with several announcements at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 in Los Angeles.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, and the future of the web and computing as we see it, watch live as Ray Ozzie lays it out in his keynote address, streamed live today at 11:30 eastern time, 8:30 am Pacific, over at http://microsoftpdc.com/.

Oh – and if your Latin is rusty, my title above comes from the phrase ”Si vis pacem, para bellum” – the classic doctrine of maintaining peace & deterring war by being better armed and prepared. It is generally attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a fourth-century AD Roman military scholar whom I consider the Sun Tzu of the West. I’ve known many fans of his philosophy in the Pentagon.

Now it may turn out that, whether they know it or not, Microsoft techies are building new ways to avoid a war on the open web. As Sun Tzu wrote,  ”To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Watch our PDC this week to see examples of what I consider the modern technological acme of skill.

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Change, at Microsoft not always good for them anymore.

RAY OZZIE, the chief software architect at Microsoft, bristles when asked whether people think that new versions of his company’s flagship software — like Windows and Office — are exciting.

“It’s tremendously exciting,” he exclaims defensively, wheeling back from an office table and allowing his hands to flail. “Are you kidding?”

From NYTimes article

Microsoft FUSE Labs, Τι ετοιμάζεται; | Techblog
H Microsoft δημιούργησε το FUSE Labs (Future Social Experiences), ένα group 82 ατόμων με επικεφαλής τον Ray Ozzie (δημιουργό του Lotus Notes). Η πληροφορία διέρρευσε από το εσωτερικό σημείωμα που έστειλε ο ίδιος ο Ozzie σε συναδέλφους του εχθές το πρωί. Δεν υπάρχει επίσημη ανακοίνωση ούτε το γίνεται αναφορά για το ακριβές αντικείμενο του group. Ο Ozzie στο σημείωμά του αναφέρει μεταξύ άλλων ότι το γρήγορο ίντερνετ και ο ολοένα και αυξανόμενος αριθμός ηλεκτρονικών συσκευών που συνδέεται σε αυτό μεγαλώνει αλλάζοντας τους τρόπους που χρησιμοποιούμε ακόμα και το λειτουργικό μας σύστημα[next]

You want to know why Microsoft has a large r&d arm in Israel? Ask Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.

Ozzie is in Israel to attend the “Think Next” annual conference. 23 start ups parading their talents and hopes in front of the industry’s finest. As Ozzie was quoted back in Hebrew: -

There are some wonderful technologies here, which makes you want to find out more about them.

Mere words? As Ozzie was quizzing the latest group of Israeli entrepreneurs, I was visiting a company a few miles down the road. Its technology has the capacity to compress data on a computer by 50%. The ROI per work station can be measured, reaching thousands of dollars in a few years.

Ray Ozzie, [Bill Gates'] successor as chief software architect, doesn’t have anything close to the confrontational approach that the Microsoft co-founder used to shape the company.

“It’s as though you’ve been running Italy using the Mafia for the last 20 years and you bring in a priest,” said Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service technology newsletter.

One year later, Microsoft feels subtle effects of Gates’ transition, Todd Bishop

I’ve done plenty of blogging about cloud computing in the past and here are two more links on the topic. First up is a BusinessWeek breakdown on how cloud computing will change business and next is the thoughts of Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, on cloud computing.

From the BusinessWeek link:

In 1990, in a keynote speech at the Comdex computer conference, Microsoft’s (MSFT) then-chief executive, Bill Gates, bolstered his bona fides as a tech visionary when he declared the PC industry would produce advances within a few years that would put information at people’s fingertips. To get there, Gates said, the world needed three things: a more “personal” personal computer, more powerful communications networks, and easy access to a broad range of information. Sometimes visionaries are right on the vision but off on the timing.

Only now is Gates’ grand vision finally becoming a reality for businesses. While pieces of what he had in mind have been available for years, they typically were expensive and difficult to set up and use. Now that more personal PC is here in the form of smartphones and mini-laptops, and broadband wireless networks make it possible for people to be connected almost anytime and anywhere. At the same time, we’re seeing the rise of cloud computing, the vast array of interconnected machines managing the data and software that used to run on PCs. This combination of mobile and cloud technologies is shaping up to be one of most significant advances in the computing universe in decades. “The big vision: We’re finally getting there,” says Donagh Herlihy, chief information officer of Avon Products (AVP). “Today, wherever you are, you can connect to all the information you need.”

And here’s Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie:

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.

Netbooks are cheap and selling like hotcakes.

But they will never make up the majority of the market, says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

Traditional laptops built on Windows and Intel-based chips will still account for the majority of sales, Ozzie said Thursday at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto.

Netbooks will never be the majority of the market, says Ray Ozzie

That’s because most people who buy netbooks expect to use them as laptops and not as stripped down, browser-based devices for roaming the Web.

They expect to install Office and to download PC-oriented software. And if the devices fail to do everything they want, they will be disappointed.

These expectations will work against ARM-based netbooks because ARM chips aren’t built to run all the world’s PC software, says Ozzie. “It will be a different type of device.”

As for the opportunity facing Microsoft, Ozzie said the company’s forth coming Windows 7 will run well on netbooks. Up to now, PC makers have used Windows XP and Linux, but not Microsoft’s more memory-demanding Windows Vista.

Ray Ozzie, jefe en software en Microsoft, hablo acerca de un amplio rango de temas relacionados con el “cloud computing”, pero la discusión más memorable vino cuando se le pregunto acerca del efecto de las netbooks. Uno pudiera pensar que esas laptops accesibles y de bajas prestaciones existen principalmente para acceder a Internet las cuales en un momento podrían amenazar al gigante del software. Pero ese no es el caso, dijo Ozzie.

“En realidad, no sé lo que una netbook es,” dijo Ozzie, a quien se le interrogó en el escenario en una reunión en Silicon Valley. “Una netbook esta evolucionando en un aparato accesible con las mismas características que una PC. Es una laptop. … Entre más laptops haya, más feliz estoy.”

Y no sólo es Microsoft quien ha estado mudando sus aplicaciones e infraestructura a la Web – de hecho se sabe que uno de los esfuerzos de Ozzie es empujar a Microsoft ha esa dirección – pero cuando hablamos de esas laptops, Ozzie dijo: “Siempre vamos a necesitar un sistema operativo. … La experiencia por encima de ese sistema operativo es la que está cambiando.”

Un reportero le hizo notar a Ozzie que el próximo sistema operativo de la compañía, Windows 7, no funcionará con netbooks que lleven el procesador ARM. El problemas con esas netbooks, dijo él, es que no están dentro de los estándares de una laptop normal, y los consumidores quieren netbooks que sean lo más parecidas a una laptop. Pero él no descarta esa posibilidad.

Otra frase graciosa que pronunció Ozzie cuando se le interrogó acerca de Google Wave, la nueva herramienta de colaboración y comunicaciones online de la compañía. Respondió que se ve “bien”, pero que también parece ser “anti-web” en su complejidad, porque Wave puede existir en varios lugares en toda la Web, todos ellos actualizados en tiempo real.

“Sólo por la naturaleza de su complejidad, nadie será capaz de hacer una implementación verdaderamente fundamental,” él dijo. “[Los desarrolladores de Wave] no tienen opción. … El problema al que se enfrentaron, la menara en que lo definieron, es un problema inherentemente complejo.”

Ray Ozzie was reported in the IDG News Service late last week, in one of his rare outings with the Media on his views of Cloud Computing and the appetite for it by the Enterprise Sector.

In essence he believes that the first wave of adoption by Corporates will be the transition of Email and Collaboration technologies to this mode of operation, and this makes perfect sence.

The competition is clearly eyeing both of these solution spaces with offerings from IBM’s Lotus with Lotus Live – Email, and Lotus Live – Engage; as well as Google with GMail and Google Apps.

Talk to any one of these vendors and they will have their complete “Cloud Ready” spiel at hand, and all of their offerings have their marketing engines winding up well beyond the “Beta” messaging often being used.

Have a look at the article with Ozzie’s comments on ComputerWorld here.

Regards,

Glenn Irvine
glenn.irvine@collaborativeview.com

We’re catching up on our Tech News. Here’s a recent headline from CNET.com:

“Ray Ozzie on the cloud …”

(click here for the real story)

What comes to your mind?

Here’s what came to ours:

And, which one is actually cloud nine?

Guess what Bill do on the last day at Microsoft….It’s hillarious….

This guy net worth $40 billion…is everyone dream! Today is Tuesday~~ Sigh..enjoy the video and continue working!!

Featuring Bill Gates, Brian Williams, Jay Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, Matthew McConaughey, George Clooney, Jon Stuart, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and from Microsoft: Steve Ballmer, Christine White, Lisa Brummell, Robbie Bach, Kevin Turner, Ray Ozzie, and Craig Mundie.

Tim O´Reilly loves Twitter. That´s why:

1. Twitter is simple.
2. Twitter works like people do.
3. Twitter cooperates well with others.
4. Twitter transcends the web.
5. Twitter is user-extensible.
6. Twitter evolves quickly.

Ray Ozzie apparently too:

… he offers some quick bites about his passions—in a style suggested, he says, by the 140-character format in Twitter. (The fact that he references Twitter and not a Microsoft product is a statement in itself.)

I love software, because if you can imagine something, you can build it.

I love Windows, because without it there would be no PC. There would be no PC developers. There might not even be a Web.

I love the ubiquitous Web because of the connections that it opened up.

I love competition. But when we’re behind a competitor, I hate it when we find ourselves just chasing their taillights.

BTW, a good characterization of Ray, IMHO.

Pownce is being acquired by SixApart and will close. Dave has a quick reflection and explains why it never really took off. Related, Steve Gillmor is of the opinion that there is no competition to Twitter or FriendFeed, not even close. Makes me wonder why he is posting spamming so much on Identi.ca. After having seen him at BearHugCamp, I am anyway without words when I think of him.

Bruce mentioning the use and value of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks.

Just finished reading Stephen Levy’s story in this months Wired magazine about Ray Ozzie, the new chief software architect at Microsoft and successor to Bill Gates.  He’s the one responsible for some of the more dramatic moves that the company has been promoting recently including Windows Azure, Zurich (Azure Services Platform), Live Mesh, and Office Web Apps.  The four tiers of his strategy to save Microsoft are almost completely focused on “cloud computing”.

1. Windows Azure is the platform underneath it all, a cloud operating system (formerly codenamed Red Dog) to provide servers to host the various applications that will eventually live on the web.  Competition: Google App Engine, Amazon EC2.
2. The Azure Services Platform will provide a set of tools to help developers manage the interaction between their apps and the cloud OS.  Competition is currently a set of free open source tools.
3. Live Mesh is a service built on Azure to allow PC and Mac synchronization across all their files.  Competition: Apple MobileMe.
4. Office Web Apps are the popular Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) available in the cloud. Subscription-based or free ad-supported versions.  Competition is strong: Google Docs, Yahoo Zimbra, Zoho (all available now).

Whether or not this strategy works, or is an indication of the hype surrounding cloud computing today, remains to be seen. But for sure, Microsoft is quite focused on it.  Ray’s lead for the Red Dog project Amitabh Srivastava, convinced the immortal Dave Cutler (of VMS/WNT fame) to come out of retirement for it.

Interesting times are certainly ahead.