[nfbmi-talk] Amazing, Inspirational Memo From Top Microsoft Exec

Tue Oct 26 00:56:56 UTC 2010

Ray Ozzie

ray ozzie's blog

Dawn of a New Day

The Internet Services Disruption

Dawn of a New Day

To:           Executive Staff and direct reports

Date:         October 28, 2010

From:         Ray Ozzie

Subject:      Dawn of a New Day

Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote

The Internet Services Disruption

 in order to kick off a major change management process across the company.
In the

opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our
industry experiences

what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and
change.

In the wake of that memo, the last five years has been a time of great
transformation

for Microsoft.  At this point we’re truly

all in

 with regard to services.  I’m incredibly proud of the people and the work
that has

been done across the company, and of the way that we’ve turned this

services transformation

 into opportunities that will pay off for years to come.

In the realm of the service-centric ‘seamless OS’ we’re well on the path to
having

Windows Live serve as an optional yet natural services complement to the
Windows

and Office software.  In the realm of ‘seamless productivity’, Office 365
and our

2010 Office, SharePoint and Live deliverables have shifted Office from being
PC-centric

toward now also robustly spanning the web and mobile.  In ‘seamless
entertainment’,

Xbox Live has transformed Xbox into a real-time, social, media-rich TV
experience.

And in the realm of what I referred to as our ‘services platform’, I
couldn’t be

more proud of what’s emerged as Windows Azure & SQL Azure.  Inspired by
little more

than a memo, a few decks and discussions, intrapreneurial leaders stepped up
to build

and deliver an innovative service that, while still nascent, will over time
prove

to be transformational for the company and the industry.

Our products are now more relevant than ever.  Bing has blossomed and its
advertising,

social, metadata & real-time analytics capabilities are growing to power
every one

of our myriad services offerings.  Over the years the Windows client
expanded its

relevance even with the rise of low-cost netbooks.  Office expanded its
relevance

even with a shift toward open data formats & web-based productivity.  Our
server

assets have had greater relevance even with a marked shift toward
virtualization

& cloud computing.

Quite important to me, I’m also quite proud of the degree to which we’ve
continued

to grow and mature in the area of responsible competition, and the breadth
and depth

of our cultural shift toward genuine openness, interoperability and privacy
which

are now such key cornerstones of everything we do.

Yet, for all our great progress, some of the opportunities I laid out in my
memo

five years ago remain elusive and are yet to be realized.

Certain of our competitors’ products and their rapid advancement &
refinement of

new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy.  Our early and clear vision
notwithstanding,

their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless
fusion

of hardware & software & services, and in social networking & myriad new
forms of

internet-centric social interaction.

We’ve seen agile innovation playing out before a backdrop in which many
dramatic

changes have occurred across all aspects of our industry’s core
infrastructure.

These myriad evolutions of our infrastructure have been predicted for years,
but

in the past five years so much has happened that we’ve grown already to take
many

of these changes for granted:  Ubiquitous internet access over wired, WiFi
and 3G/4G

networks; many now even take for granted that LTE and ‘whitespace’ will be
broadly

delivered.  We’ve seen our boxy devices based on ‘system boards’ morph into
sleek

elegantly-designed devices based on transformational ‘systems on a chip’.
We’ve

seen bulky CRT monitors replaced by impossibly thin touch screens.  We’ve
seen business

processes and entire organizations transformed by the zero-friction nature
of the

internet; the walls between producer and consumer having now vanished.
Substantial

business ecosystems have collapsed as many classic aggregation &
distribution mechanisms

no longer make sense.

Organizations worldwide, in every industry, are now stepping back and
re-thinking

the basics; questioning their most fundamental structural tenets.  Doing so
is necessary

for their long-term growth and survival.  And our own industry is no
exception, where

we must question our most fundamental assumptions about infrastructure &
apps.

The past five years have been breathtaking.  But the next five years will
bring about

yet another inflection point – a transformation that will once again yield
unprecedented

opportunities for our company and our industry catalyzed by the huge &
inevitable

shift in apps & infrastructure that’s truly now just begun.

Imagining A “Post-PC” World

One particular day next month, November 20th

 2010, represents a significant milestone.  Those of us in the PC industry
who placed

an early bet on a then-nascent PC graphical UI will toast that day as being
the 25

th

 anniversary of the launch of Windows 1.0.

Our journey began in support of audacious concepts that were originally just
imagined

and dreamed:

A computer that’s ‘personal’.

 Or, a PC on every desktop and in every home, running Microsoft software.

Windows may not have been the first graphical UI on a personal computer, but
over

time the product unquestionably democratized computing & communications for
more

than a billion people worldwide.  Windows and Office truly grew to

define

 the PC; establishing the core concepts and usage scenarios that for so many
of us,

over time, have become etched in stone.

For the most part, we’ve grown to perceive of ‘computing’ as being equated
with specific

familiar ‘artifacts’ such as the ‘computer’, the ‘program’ that’s installed
on a

computer, and the ‘files’ that are stored on that computer’s ‘desktop’.  For
the

majority of users, the PC is largely indistinguishable even from the
‘browser’ or

‘internet’.

As such, it’s difficult for many of us to even imagine that this could ever
change.

But as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots
over

the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply

immense

 complexity.  This is a direct by-product of the PC’s success: how broad and
diverse

the PC’s ecosystem has become; how complex it’s become to manage the
acquisition

& lifecycle of our hardware, software, and data artifacts.  It’s undeniable
that

some form of this complexity is readily apparent to most all our customers:
your

neighbors; any small business owner; the ‘tech’ head of household;
enterprise IT.

Success begets product requirements.  And even when superhuman engineering
and design

talent is applied, there are limits to how much you can apply beautiful
veneers before

inherent complexity is destined to bleed through.

Complexity kills.

Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes
products

difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security
challenges.

Complexity causes administrator frustration.

And as time goes on and as software products mature – even with the best of
intent

– complexity is inescapable.

Indeed, many have pointed out that there’s a flip side to complexity:  in
our industry,

complexity of a successful product also tends to provide some assurance of
its longevity.

Complex interdependencies and any product’s inherent ‘quirks’ will virtually
guarantee

that broadly adopted systems won’t simply vanish overnight.  And so long as
a system

is well-supported and continues to provide unique and material value to a
customer,

even many of the most complex and broadly maligned assets will hold their
ground.

And why not?  They’re valuable.  They work.

But so long as customer or competitive requirements drive teams to build
layers of

new function on top of a complex core, ultimately a limit will be reached.
Fragility

can grow to constrain agility.  Some deep architectural strengths can become
irrelevant

– or worse, can become hindrances.

Our PC software has driven the creation of an amazing ecosystem, and is
incredibly

valuable to a world of customers and partners.  And the PC and its ecosystem
is going

to keep growing, and growing, for a long time to come.  But today, as I
wrote five

years ago,

”Just as in the past, we must reflect upon what’s going on around us, and
reflect

upon our strengths, weaknesses and industry leadership responsibilities, and
respond.

As much as ever, it’s clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we
know it

is at risk.”

And so at this juncture, given all that has transpired in computing and
communications,

it’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and
customers will

ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a

post-PC world

 might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur.  How would
customers accomplish

the kinds of things they do today?  In what ways would it be better?  In
what ways

would it be worse, or just different?

Those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will
earn the

opportunity to lead.

In our industry, if you can imagine something, you can build it.  We at
Microsoft

know from our common past – even the past five years – that if we know what
needs

to be done, and if we act decisively, any challenge can be transformed into
a significant

opportunity.  And so, the first step for each of us is to

imagine fearlessly

; to dream.

Continuous Services | Connected Devices

What’s happened in every aspect of computing & communications over the
course of

the past five years has given us much to dream about.  Certainly the
‘net-connected

PC, and PC-based servers, have driven the creation of an incredible industry
and

have laid the groundwork for mass-market understanding of so much of what’s
possible

with ‘computers’.  But slowly but surely, our lives, businesses and society
are in

the process of a

wholesale reconfiguration in the way we perceive and apply technology.

As we’ve begun to embrace today’s incredibly powerful app-capable phones and
pads

into our daily lives, and as we’ve embraced myriad innovative services &
websites,

the early adopters among us have decidedly begun to move away from mentally
associating

our computing activities with the hardware/software artifacts of our past
such as

PC’s, CD-installed programs, desktops, folders & files.

Instead, to cope with the inherent complexity of a world of devices, a world
of websites,

and a world of apps & personal data that is spread across myriad devices &
websites,

a simple conceptual model is taking shape that brings it all together.
We’re moving

toward a world of 1) cloud-based

continuous services

 that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like

connected devices

 enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

Continuous services

 are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more
of what

we do.  On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound
world of

cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded
scale.  They’re

constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online
worlds.  They’re

constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t.
By bringing

us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric
underlying

our society, organizations and lives.  From news & entertainment, to
transportation,

to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are
being

transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate
flawlessly,

7×24, behind the scenes.

Our personal and corporate data now sits within these services – and as a
result

we’re more and more concerned with issues of trust & privacy.  We most
commonly engage

and interact with these internet-based sites & services through the browser.
But

increasingly, we also interact with these continuous services through apps
that are

loaded onto a broad variety of service-connected devices – on our desks, or
in our

pockets & pocketbooks.

Connected devices

 beyond the PC will increasingly come in a breathtaking number of shapes and
sizes,

tuned for a broad variety of communications, creation & consumption tasks.
Each

individual will interact with a fairly good number of these connected
devices on

a daily basis – their phone / internet companion; their car; a shared public
display

in the conference room, living room, or hallway wall.  Indeed some of these
connected

devices may even grow to bear a resemblance to today’s desktop PC or
clamshell laptop.

But there’s one key difference in tomorrow’s devices: they’re relatively
simple and

fundamentally

appliance-like

 by design, from birth.  They’re instantly usable, interchangeable, and
trivially

replaceable without loss.  But being

appliance-like

 doesn’t mean that they’re not also quite capable in terms of storage;
rather, it

just means that storage has shifted to being more cloud-centric than
device-centric.

A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or
synchronized

with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

Moving forward, these ‘connected devices’ will also frequently take the form
of embedded

devices of varying purpose including telemetry & control.  Our world
increasingly

will be filled with these devices – from the remotely diagnosed elevator, to
the

sensors on our highways and throughout our environment.  These embedded
devices will

share a key attribute with non-embedded UI-centric devices:  they’re
appliance-like,

easily configured, interchangeable and replaceable without loss.

At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices

doesn’t seem very different than today.  But those who build, deploy and
manage today’s

websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is
incredibly

difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated high-scale consumer
websites.

And those who build and deploy application fabrics targeting connected
devices understand

how challenging it can be to simply & reliably just ‘sync’ or ‘stream’.  To
achieve

these seemingly simple objectives will require dramatic innovation in human
interface,

hardware, software and services.

How It Might Happen

>From the perspective of living so deeply within the world of the
device-centric software

& hardware that we’ve collectively created over the past 25 years, it’s
understandably

difficult to imagine how a dramatic, wholesale shift toward this new

continuous services + connected devices

 model would ever plausibly gain traction relative to what’s so broadly in
use today.

But in the technology world, these industry-scoped transformations have
indeed happened

before.  Complexity accrues; dramatically new and improved capabilities
arise.

Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and
mainframe,

the key facets of

simplicity and broad approachability

 were key to its amazing success.  If there’s to be a next wave of industry
reconfiguration

– toward a world of internet-connected

continuous services and appliance-like connected devices

 – it would likely arise again from those very same facets.

It may take quite a while to happen, but I believe that in some form or
another,

without doubt, it will.

For each of us who can clearly envision the end-game, the opportunity is to
recognize

both the inevitability and value inherent in the

big shift

 ahead, and to do what it takes to lead our customers into this new world.

In the short term, this means imagining the ‘killer apps & services’ and
‘killer

devices’ that match up to a broad range of customer needs as they’ll evolve
in this

new era.  Whether in the realm of communications, productivity,
entertainment or

business, tomorrow’s experiences & solutions are likely to differ
significantly even

from today’s most successful apps.  Tomorrow’s experiences will be
inherently transmedia

& trans-device.  They’ll be centered on your own social & organizational
networks.

For both individuals and businesses, new consumption & interaction models
will change

the game.  It’s inevitable.

To deliver what seems to be required – e.g. an amazing level of coherence
across

apps, services and devices – will require innovation in user experience,
interaction

model, authentication model, user data & privacy model, policy & management
model,

programming & application model, and so on.  These platform innovations will
happen

in small, progressive steps, providing significant opportunity to lead.  In
adapting

our strategies, tactics, plans & processes to deliver what’s required by
this new

world, the opportunity is simply

huge.

The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any
transformation that

is to ‘stick’ must emerge from within.  Those on the outside can strongly
influence,

particularly with their wallets.  Those above are responsible for developing
and

articulating a compelling vision, eliminating obstacles, prioritizing
resources,

and generally setting the stage with a principled approach.

But the power and responsibility to truly effect transformation exists in no
small

part at the edge

.  Within those who, led or inspired, feel personally and collectively
motivated

to

make; to act; to do.

In taking the time to read this, most likely it’s you.

Realizing a Dream

In 1939, in New York City, there was an amazing World’s Fair.  It was called
‘the

greatest show of all time’.

In that year Americans were exhausted, having lived through a decade of
depression.

Unemployment still hovered above 17%.  In Europe, the next world war was
brewing.

It was an undeniably dark juncture for us all.

And yet, this

1939 World’s Fair

 opened in a way that evoked broad and acute hope: the promise of a glorious
future.

There were pavilions from industry & countries all across the world showing
vision;

showing progress:  The Futurama; The World of Tomorrow.  Icons conjuring up
images

of the future:  The Trylon; The Perisphere.

The fair’s theme:  Dawn of a New Day.

Surrounding the event,

stories

 were written and

vividly

told

 to help everyone envision and dream of a future of modern conveniences;
superhighways

& spacious suburbs; technological wonders to alleviate hardship and improve
everyday

life.

The fair’s exhibits and stories laid a broad-based imprint across society of
what

needed to be done.  To plausibly leap from such a dark time to such a
potentially

wonderful future meant having an attitude, individually and collectively,
that we

could achieve

whatever we set our minds to.  That anything was possible.

In the following years – fueled both by what was necessary for survival and

by our hope for the future – manufacturing jumped 50%.  Technological
breakthroughs

abounded.  What had been so hopefully and optimistically imagined by many,
was achieved

by all.

And, as their children, now we’re living their dreams.

Today, in my own dreams, I see a great, expansive future for our industry
and for

our company – a future of amazing, pervasive cloud-centric experiences
delivered

through a world of innovative devices that surround us.

Without a doubt, as in 1939 there are conditions in our society today that
breed

uncertainty: jobs, housing, health, education, security, the environment.
And yes,

there are also challenging conditions for our company: it’s a tough,
fast-moving,

and highly competitive environment.

And yet, even in the presence of so much uncertainty, I feel an acute sense
of hope

and optimism.

When I look forward, I can’t help but see the potential for a much brighter
future:

Even beyond the first billion, so many more people using technology to
improve their

lives, businesses and societies, in so many ways.  New apps, services &
scenarios

in communications, collaboration & productivity, commerce, education, health
care,

emergency management, human services, transportation, the environment,
security –

the list goes on, and on, and on.

We’ve got so far to go

 before we even scratch the surface of what’s now possible.  All these new
services

will be cloud-centric ‘continuous services’ built in a way that we can all
rely upon.

As such, cloud computing will become pervasive for developers and IT – a
shift that’ll

catalyze the transformation of infrastructure, systems & business processes
across

all major organizations worldwide.  And all these new services will work
hand-in-hand

with an unimaginably fascinating world of devices-to-come.  Today’s PC’s,
phones

& pads are just the very beginning; we’ll see decades to come of incredible
innovation

from which will emerge all sorts of ‘connected companions’ that we’ll wear,
we’ll

carry, we’ll use on our desks & walls and the environment all around us.
Service-connected

devices going far beyond just the ‘screen, keyboard and mouse’:
humanly-natural

‘conscious’ devices that’ll see, recognize, hear & listen to you and what’s
around

you, that’ll feel your touch and gestures and movement, that’ll detect your
proximity

to others; that’ll sense your location, direction, altitude, temperature,
heartbeat

& health.

Let there be no doubt that the big shifts occurring over the next five years
ensure

that this will absolutely be a time of great opportunity for those who put
past technologies

& successes into perspective, and envision all the transformational value
that can

be offered moving forward to individuals, businesses, governments and
society.  It’s

the dawn of a new day – the sun having now arisen on a world of

 continuous services and

 connected devices

.

And so, as Microsoft has done so successfully over the course of the
company’s history,

let’s mark this five-year milestone by once again fearlessly embracing that
which

is technologically inevitable – clearing a path to the extraordinary
opportunity

that lies ahead for us, for the industry, and for our customers.

Ray