Ray Ozzie has started a new blog and posts on Dawn of a New Day.
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.
Ray finds information about 25 years on Nov 20 1985.
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 25thanniversary of the launch of Windows 1.0.
25 years ago I was working at Apple. Wow look at where Apple is after 25 years and where Microsoft is. In 1992 I moved from Apple to Microsoft.
From 1985 to 1992 here is Apple vs. Microsoft stock.
But what are the last 5 years like as Ray is infamous for his e-mail waking up Microsoft.
Ray argues for simplicity
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 Data Center Services he calls Continuous 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.
And future are appliance devices.
But there’s one key difference in tomorrow’s devices: they’re relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-likeby 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.
Ray’s vision is centered around always on data center services with a range of simple appliances to connect to the services.
Who wants to go back to a time when editing win.ini or Mac ResEdit?
Ray paints an interesting future where Google, Microsoft, and Apple will compete for Continuous Services and Connected Devices.
