“Looked at from the outside, Ray’s departure might appear sudden or unexpected. But those of us who have watched his frustration build over the years can’t help but wonder what took him this long,” Leonhard reports. “I wrote yesterday about the role of the designer at Apple, and how the veneration afforded designers — who sit on the right hand of Steve — may well be the primary force driving Apple’s ongoing success. Now comes word that Microsoft’s head designer Ray Ozzie — officially Chief Software Architect, de facto the highest level designer in the company, with a purview outside the tired Windows/Office megalith — has decided to take a break.”
MacDailyNews Take: Somebody finally fixed one enough to get it to boot up and Ozzie saw the writing on the Big Ass Table?
Leonhard reports, “Ozzie’s biggest contribution to Microsoft’s future direction has to be the October 28, 2006, memo titled The Internet Services Disruption. An insightful blueprint for the future, Microsoft stood up, took notice, but hasn’t followed through very well.”
“He took on several new projects at Microsoft, but the most visible was Azure. In 2008, at the Professional Developer’s Conference, he described Azure as a cloud-based operating system complete with its own Application Programming Interface. A year later, Azure was a tiny shadow of its former self,” Leonhard reports. “At the end of December 2009, Microsoft went through another re-org, pulling the Azure project out from under Ozzie’s purview. A product called Azure has been released, but the feature set doesn’t even begin to match the lofty initial design.”
“Then there’s the personality thing. Ozzie is anything but a Ballmer toadie. I was — and still am — amazed at the difference in perception and vision displayed at the D8 conference in June. Watch the full interview and you’ll see: Ozzie “gets’ the cloud, no question. Ballmer’s grasp leaves something to be desired. (Ozzie’s correcting Ballmer on-stage rates as a nonpareil Career Limiting Move, even at his level, but I digress,)” Leonhard reports. “Ozzie isn’t the only frustrated genius at Microsoft. The Redmond campus is packed with ’em. But his departure marks a real turning point in Microsoft’s devolution, er, evolution.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully this means that Ballmer is consolidating his power in order to remain ensconced atop the dysfunctional Redmond waste heap for as long as it takes. We like his strategy. We like it a lot.