I have been waiting for this. Ray Ozzie is leaving Microsoft. And Eight Finger Eddie - the hippie who apparently discovered Anjuna Beach is dead. I vaguely remember that in the book - "The Road Ahead" - Bill Gates said the coolest programmers were hippies who trekked in India and then went back to Silicon Valley and wrote some super applications. I do not remember now if he was referring to Ray Ozzie or if he was referring to Mitch Kapor. But if he was referring to Ray Ozzie, then Ray can rediscover his hippie days by taking the place of Eight Finger Eddie at Anjuna. He can enjoy Ajuna's azure water - among other things.
I have been waiting for Ray Ozzie to leave Microsoft because it paves the way for the return of The King - BillG. The sad thing for all of us is that in the computer industry today, guys who were always second best are looking like superstars now since The King is not around. As a parallel, in the tamil movie industry for instance, Vijay or Surya would have been acting in Enthiran if Rajnikanth had not been around.
Take for instance Steve Jobs. For nearly 20 years, Apple had been making Macs - own hardware on own OS. And they have always had a less than 10% share of the market. Apple's products were cool and over priced. And a few people who thought coolness was a requirement bought Apple products. For the rest of the world Windows on any hardware was the solution. And Steve Jobs went around telling everyone that Microsoft stole Apple's user interface. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But if your only claim to fame is a cool user interface then you deserve only a 10% share of the market. And then when BillG was busy getting kids in Africa and India vaccinated (or whatever it is he does - not sure because most of the news just says he does charity), Steve Jobs goes out and copies Microsoft's greatest idea - the route to a mountain of money is to first pick an existing product that is poorly made and does not have a good business model though the potential market is huge. Then perfect the product, build a great business model around it, work with partners and focus only on the core. Very soon there is a flood of cash. So Steve goes to a Taiwanese manufacturer, asks them to make what is essentially the Creative music player but in a white box. He goes to all the music companies and tells them to put all their music on his website and he will pay each time someone downloads a song. The kids like this because it is easier to search and download songs from an Apple website rather than searching for pirated music from a multitude of web sites.
Or Eric Schmidt for that matter. Novell had such a hard time competing with Microsoft when BillG was around. BillG had Netware for breakfast. Does anyone remember Sun Microsystems - "we are the dot in .com" - whatever that meant. And though Larry Ellison for ever has been trying to compete with Microsoft, he does not seem to be getting anywhere. After having acquired every possible company in the IT industry, Oracle continues to remain a much smaller company than Microsoft. And though Larry Ellison was the first guy to talk about "computing on tap", Amazon seems to have stolen the lead on that front.
Well Microsoft itself is not Microsoft anymore. Why would SQL Server Azure be more expensive than SQL Server on AWS? Unless someone at Microsoft seriously believes that they will keep selling hardware boxes and Enterpise licenses for ever. The Windows and Office teams at Microsoft need a good strong shake up. Else Google Apps will have them for breakfast. Google Apps cant do a lot of stuff that Excel can do. But then millions of users do not use most of the fancy stuff on Excel - try this at your office - ask your Excel users to do a PivotTable. If they cant do PivotTable, then they dont need Excel - Google Apps is enough.
So here is wishing BillG will leave the charity to the professionals. Let him keep writing the cheques and let someone else actually fly to Africa/India to review progress. Lets get BillG back where he belongs - at the head of Microsoft and kicking some serious butt. The only conditions should be - he cannot use the word Windows in any communication and he should support Flash on all devices. Let him reinvent Microsoft completely - from scratch.
Why Windows 7 when we can be on Cloud 9 ?
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