Former top Microsoft exec Ozzie: World is over the PC

14 years ago

“Ray Ozzie, the man who succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft Corp’s tech visionary, believes the world has moved past the personal computer, potentially leaving behind the world’s largest software company,” Bill Rigby reports for Reuters.

MacDailyNews Take: A Microsoft “tech visionary’s” job: Watching what Apple does, throw it into blender in order to inoculate it from legal proceedings – unless we’re talking retail stores and then you just copy as exactly as possible, including locations – and foist it onto a technologically ignorant public. The main problem for Microsoft is that consumers have become technologically literate, can see that their “tech vision” has been, for decades, whatever Apple was doing, upside-down and backwards, 5-10+ years late.

“The PC, which was Microsoft’s foundation and still determines the company’s financial performance, has been nudged aside by powerful phones and tablets running Apple Inc and Google Inc software, the former Microsoft executive said,” Rigby reports.

MacDailyNews Take: Speaking of Apple knockoff non-artists.

Rigby reports, “‘People argue about ‘are we in a post-PC world?.’ Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world,’ Ozzie said at a technology conference run by tech blog GeekWire in Seattle on Wednesday. ‘That doesn’t mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.'”

MacDailyNews Take: How about “trucks,” Mr. Visionary?

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people… I think that we’re embarked on that… You know, people laugh at me because I use the phrase “magical” to describe the iPad. But it’s what I really think. You have a much more direct and intimate relationship with the Internet and media, your apps, your content. It’s like some intermediate thing has been removed and stripped away. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010

Rigby reports, “Ozzie was making his first public comments on Microsoft since stepping down from the tech giant abruptly in 2010. He spoke just hours after Tim Cook, the chief executive of Microsoft’s arch-rival Apple, stressed the emergence of the ‘post-PC world” forged by the iPad.'”

MacDailyNews Take: Forever following Apple.

Rigby reports, “Ozzie said the fate of Windows 8 would determine Microsoft’s future. The latest version of the company’s operating system will work on tablets powered by low-power ARM Holdings chips, which Microsoft hopes will allow it to rival Apple’s iPad, and put the company back at the cutting edge of consumer technology.”

MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft has never been at the cutting edge of consumer technology. Never.

Rigby reports, “Windows 8 may help Microsoft bridge the gap to the post-PC world, but the “doom and gloom” scenario for the company is people switching to portable, non-Windows devices, said Ozzie.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft’s best chance is that Android gets crippled enough and expensive enough through patent infringement litigation and royalty settlements that the HTCs of the world need a new “cheap” iOS. Even that prospect sucks, though, because iOS really isn’t expensive, as 315+ million iOS devices sold to date mightily attest.

Microsoft. The new Kodak.

As we wrote last spring:

Microsoft, in trying to cram everything into Windows 8 in an attempt to be all things to all devices, will end up with an OS that’s a jack of all trades and a master of none (which, after all, ought to be Microsoft’s company motto).

By the time this hybrid spawn of Windows Phone ’07 + Windows 7ista actually ships, one can only dream where Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X will be! For Microsoft, it’ll be more like a nightmare. Perhaps Microsoft will someday put some scare into Google’s Android/Chrome OS, but only time – and a lot of it when measured in tech time – will tell. We simply do not see the world clamoring for the UI of an iPod also-ran now ported to an iPhone wannabe that nobody’s buying to be blown up onto a PC display.

From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 strikes us as an unsavory combination of Windows Weight plus Windows Wait.

Not to mention that probably no one on earth knows how much or what kinds of residual legacy spaghetti code roils underneath it all (shudder). Is Microsoft giving up on backwards compatibility? If so, people might as well get the Mac they always wanted. If not, then Microsoft’s unwilling to do what it takes to really attempt to keep up with the likes of Apple or even Apple’s followers. No matter what, if Microsoft’s going to ask Windows sufferers to “learn a whole new computer” (and that’s exactly how they’ll look at it, regardless of how Microsoft pitches it), millions will simply say, “Time to get a Mac to match my iPod, iPhone, and iPad!”

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mac 95” for the heads up.]