Microsoft’s software guru Ray Ozzie has warned the technology giant in a memo that the personal computers at the foundation of the company’s success are on the way out.
Ozzie’s memo, which was posted on his blog late Monday, coincided with his planned retirement from the company, which was announced last week. It came after years in which the world’s largest software company has fallen well behind rivals like Apple and Google in developing the two main planks of the post-PC world — smartphones and other non-traditional, Internet-enabled devices, and the web-based software that runs on remote servers and can be accessed by users from any device.
Ozzie was brought into Microsoft as chief software architect in 2005 to replace Bill Gates and refocus the company on cloud computing and social networking. Now he envisions a future of powerful web services independent of hardware and appliance-like devices that “we’ll wear, we’ll carry, we’ll use on our desks and walls and the environment all around us.” The mouse and keyboard will be eclipsed by natural interfaces that sense the user’s position, movement and touch, Ozzie wrote.
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The memo, titled ‘Dawn of a New Day’, praised Microsoft’s efforts to shift from a PC-centric strategy to a cloud-based approach. This includes the transition of its Office productivity suite to become available in an online version.
The company has recently launched the Windows Phone 7 platform, which has been judged as a worthy competitor to the iPhone and Android-based phones. But Ozzie conceded that the company’s rivals had outperformed Microsoft.
“Their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware and software and services, and in social networking and myriad new forms of Internet-centric social interaction.”
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Ozzie blamed Microsoft’s love affair with the PC for its failure to grasp these new technologies and said that if Microsoft wanted to thrive in the future, it had to envision a world that cares about “continuous services” rather than computers.
“Close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur,” he urged. “Those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead.”