Ray Ozzie To Step Down From His Role At Microsoft 229
denobug writes "Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, is stepping down. He is to remain with Microsoft until he retires, focusing his efforts 'in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments,' based on a memo from Steve Ballmer. Also according to Steve's memo, the role of CSA was unique and it will not be filled."
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think a software company needs a chief software architect?
This is /., not FOX News. (Score:1, Insightful)
Instead of just asking bullshit leading questions, you should make some statements of fact or opinion, and we can discuss those.
Re:End of Azure (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, what's left that we can yet copy from iTunes, Sony, OS X, Java, VMware and Amazon?
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
"Software architects" are by far one of the worst things that can happen to a company that develops software products.
Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks" that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense. Yet somehow these frameworks end up being hugely complex piles of shit. The original software products end up being ignored or remain undeveloped, since so many resources went into developing these cock-awful frameworks.
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
I think its more like having a single technical lead in a powerful position is a bad thing for management because they keep asking hard questions. So lets split the role into smaller project based positions, leaving the strategy to management and marketing.
TRANSLATION: Ballmer will resign in 2011 (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who doesn't speak corporate-speak, or the variant they use at Microsoft, this really means the following:
Ray got fired, but at his level they don't fire you. He got fired because Microsoft is a mature business and doesn't really create anything new anymore.
Ballmer refuses to split the company up (tax reasons) so he's been given a grace period of a year to find a replacement for himself.
Here endeth the lesson.
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
> Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks"
To the contrary, most decent software architects will prevent the idle developers from writing YAF.
> that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense.
I heard that kind of statement a few years ago... where was it... oh yeah I remember, it was the mainframe guy at his retirement party, he was also talking about the good ol' days of CICS and hierarchical databases, and how nobody needs a GUI, textmode 80x25 was optimal.
A good software architect is someone with experience that will define the orientations and overview the selected design patterns; as such he is instrumental in improving the quality and avoiding useless complexity.
Re:End of Azure (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't bitch at me. These are all other people's money makers, that MS slavishly copied, without any profitable revenue coming back to them.
When I mentioned Amazon, I was specifically referring to EC2 and S3.
Ray's Real Job (Score:2, Insightful)
Was official "Do Nothing".
He was installed, to keep the board and principal shareholders mollified at the prospect of a Gates departure that left the Corporation in the hands of clueless Sales executives.
"Here, Ray! Stand here, hold this, and grin."
If BillG had gone without a Ray Ozzie in place, everyone would have seen the previous 5 years of Ballmer-led "performance" - then headed for the metaphorical exit. Microsoft, instead of trading in the lackluster mid-twenties, would have been an instant 9-dollar-stock, eventually nosing up to 12 or 16...
Too many multi-millionaire, club members would have bathed on that one - Including Gates, Ballmer and Allen. So. What to do? Get yourself a scarecrow, like Ozzie, and stand him at the end of the field.
God! is there nothing about Microsoft that is not some sad, hollow sham?
Re:Let me entertain you (Score:4, Insightful)
And chock full of DRM.
DRM is irrelevant unless you have DRM-encumbered media.
I tried it once on a computer that came with it, the moment it could not play a dvd without setting a region code on the drive I knew it was not for me.
Every single licensed software DVD player on the planet requires a DVD region code to be set on the drive. This is hardly something unique to Windows 7, or even Windows.
These folks seemed to think my computer belongs to the MPAA.
Again, the DRM does nothing unless the owner of the copyright has DRM-encumbered their media. You're complaining about the wrong people.
It's not a leap forward if nobody actually leaps (Score:5, Insightful)
I used Lotus Notes for many years, starting with version 3, and I got the impression that there was some sort of philosophy behind it, but I just couldn't figure out what it was; I admit I got tangled up in the interface. A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes admin, and while I believe he "got it", the hoops the interface made him go through to do various tasks (backing up a database by copy-n-paste because it was the only "reliable" way?) negated whatever deeper benefits the platform provided.
Ultimately it comes down to execution; the web has its shortcomings, but it's simple enough that people "get it" and can use it effectively. Being relatively simple and text-based, it encourages experimentation without needing to worry that the underlying database can somehow can be corrupted or external links permanently invalidated. It doesn't hurt either the the web itself is basically "free", while Notes was (is still?) quite expensive.
I don't want to get all Godwin here, but I think a decent analogy is that Notes is a Tiger tank; sophisticated and extremely powerful, but ultimately done in by the cheap and plentiful Sherman. It doesn't mean that the Tiger wasn't better than the Sherman, it's just that the Sherman won by sheer volume.
Ozzie may be a brilliant guy, with an IQ of 100!, but if he can't execute his ideas in a way that people nowhere near as smart (say, 2!) as him can use, what's the point? History is littered with people who had brilliant ideas but are forgotten because they botched the execution. Having used both Notes and Groove (as I understand it the only other actual piece of software Ozzie actually worked on), he took a serious leap forward, just down the wrong evolutionary path.
Re:This is /., not FOX News. (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem is Fox News asks questions like: Did Obama burn the flag or did Obama spit on the flag? Leading questions are not journalism. Leading questions are another form of manipulation, fox news may have missed the point of journalism.
Re:Ray's Real Job (Score:3, Insightful)
Split the company in two, one the entertainment division based around MSN and XBOX which none of the existing board having much control over and especially which Ballmer can not influence in any way shape or form (medium and long term returns with a real future). The other the OS and Office, which MS stops developing and screw the customers over for as much as possible (maximum short to medium term returns with no real future).
That MSN lost every market to it's competitors and continues to lose money is a criminal shame and a true testament to the incompetence and arrogance of Ballmer and his cronies. Realistically by now MSN should be worth far more than Google but it is dead whilst it remains under it's current uncreative arrogant leadership.
Re:Innovation Officer for Microsoft = Total Failur (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not a leap forward if nobody actually leap (Score:1, Insightful)
Notes was a great product for the early 1990's. But like AOL and Compuserve, it was/is a walled-in garden. Once Netscape Navigator hit the scene and introduced the masses to the WWW and its extensible, standards-based architecture, a frenzy of startup activity began which continues to this day. Ozzie might have the skill and imagination of five to ten architects, but that's nothing compared to hundreds of startups and big corporations competing in a space of open standards (or at least the architectural backbone is open).
I imagine Ozzie came to MS and asked himself, what would be the equivalent of Notes for cloud computing and virtualization. It was the wrong question. Bill Gates liked Ozzie and brought him on board because he likes to be around extremely bright, visionary, articulate people. Ballmer didn't have the same investment in him.
Re:End of Azure (Score:3, Insightful)
I LIKE it. Microsoft is officially throwing in (Score:3, Insightful)
the towel on any further attempts at, ahem, innovation.
They've been flailing around and failing to imitate Apple since the creation of the Macintosh.
Apart from "rousing the giant" long enough to kill Netscape through illegal anti-competitive moves in the nineties, Microsoft has finally realized that they suck at innovation, suck at integration and suck at being anything but exactly what their big (140k+ desktop per) clients want them to be.
Look for Windows to stay on the desktop and stop being an embarrassment on other platforms.
Balmer is now at the head of a moribund company and they have started the downward spiral.
Their cash reserves will give them a soft landing for another 50 years.
But once desktop machines go away, Microsoft goes away too.
Re:Huh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:End of Azure (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you're right on paper; but I do read about organizations with no head in Ozzie's position that have a power vacuum. Business units then silo up and act less friendly to each other since they won't lend a hand to the other departments ('if I run SQL server team and devote a resource to helping XBox then maybe management will see this as my group having too many people and I'll lose power and influence -- so I won't help anyone' kind of fear driven power mongering).
Re:End of Azure (Score:3, Insightful)
Where I am the term sysadmin is almost never used (Australia). They're just server engineers, exchange admins, or whatnot. Funny how on /dot it seems to figure as a term of abuse.
Seems to me there is a big difference between 'creating a virtual machine' and designing, speccing, configuring and implementing an ESX cluster, yet I've seen both functions performed by guys whom I would just call server engineers.
Of course as infrastructure guys (I'm a network engineer) we do yes very often see that kinda behaviour from the apps side of the fence. Also the converse is equally funny, where they start ludicrously over-speccing and blaming minor everyday inconveniences (OMG WAN latency is 40ms and the app is sensitive, guess what, that app is not suited for WAN deployment end of story its not a problem with the WAN itself LOLOLOL) because their app doesn't work properly. Though I must mitigate that angle as usually by 'app doesn't work properly' its usually 'outsourced team has zero idea how the app works'. Sometimes it does seem that to a DBA, where their datastore resides is kinda like where babies come from to a 3 year old, a magic stork brings the data to them and its no concern of theirs which server or DB they parked their data in.
I just realised I went stupid off topic so apologies
Re:End of Azure (Score:1, Insightful)
It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
That only happened because no one listened to Bob Bemer, who pointed out this would be a problem back in 1958. Then in mid to late 1999 everyone finally sat up and took notice. At that point of incompetence, sure, it's easy to hire cheap labor to "solve" the problem. But if the problem had been planned for and worked around from the beginning, this could've been completely avoided. By 1980 memory spaces were easily large enough to move away from the 2 digit year standard.
Re:Let me entertain you (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, mplayer plays dvds just fine.