Adam Barr has a blog post entitled Trying to Grok Windows Live where he writes
At the Company Meeting last week, Ray Ozzie stood up and gave a very
nice, very inspiring speech about how we have to shift the company to
Live (Windows Live, Office Live, etc). He spoke without slides or notes
and it's obviously something he cares a lot about and has thought a lot
about. I'm entirely convinced that he has a great vision of the future
in his mind.
The only problem is, I really don't know what he is talking about.
I'm fully prepared to believe it's because I'm too dense to understand. But when he talks about "betting the company on Windows Live",
what does that mean? How does Windows become a service? I understand
that there are things we need to do in order to make the Internet a
platform; back in 2000 I wrote that I thought that's what .Net was. But
I don't see how this involves changing Windows in some fundamental way.
This isn't the first time I've heard someone from Microsoft say they don't understand what Ray Ozzie is talking about when he talks about "Live" software. I feel such a disconnect when I hear this because when I read Ray's "Internet Services Disruption Memo, I was like "Duh" so it is difficult to understand the perspective of people who don't appreciate the power of the Web.
From my perspective, Ray Ozzie's memo and his various speeches have one simple message
- The Web has fundamentally changed the face of computing.
- The Web is here to stay.
- The world's largest software company has to adapt to this reality
A good analogy for understanding what it means for software to embrace the Web is to compare an application like
WinAmp 3.0 which plays music on your hard drive or from CD to
iTunes 7.0 which plays music on your hard drive or from CD
and can be used to purchase music from an
online store
and can be used to subscribe to podcasts
on the Web. One doesn't have to resort to "creating an AJAX version of WinAmp" or whatever other straw man argument usually comes up in this context to turn a desktop MP3 player into "Live" software. iTunes shows that.
What Microsoft needs to do is repeat that lesson across all of its products and think about how they can embrace the Web instead of simply reacting to it or barely acknowledging its existence.