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Mix08 - The First Weeks of Ray Ozzie

Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Microsoft Mix08, Web 2.0 (Observations) |

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Mix08 this year. Having attended Mix in 2006, I had a rough idea - Microsoft showing the world what they thought of ’stuff,’ and the signals before hand pointed out to the updates of Internet Explorer 8, and so I expected several updates to other internet products as well.

What I wasn’t expecting was to catch Microsoft in the middle of a metaphorical handbrake turn to change direction. With a company the size of Microsoft, the momentum required to do this must have been huge. Given that CTO Ray Ozzie only took over the role of Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates in July 2006, I think what was on show in his keynote were the results of the decisions made in his first week in the role - yes I think they would take that long to bubble up and into the beta programs.

What was big and impressive about the keynote was the vision - it wasn’t wholly articulated, but the idea of interconnected devices, the sharing of data and applications, a personal mesh you carry with you that works together seamlessly, both for personal devices but also with enterprise services and Microsoft’s partners. Of course Ozzie has history here, but I’m pretty sure that the first week in Redmond had him laying out ideas where everything talks to everything else, and it doesn’t matter what had happened before, that’s what’s going to happen in the future.

Just the hints here were enough to make me intrigued to see what’s up next.

Of course there was another keynote… Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki’s “A Conversation With…” Normally any session with the phrase “A Conversation With…” strikes a sense of dread in me, with a bundle of pre-planned questions, knowing looks for an interviewer who;s too close to the subject to want to risk upsetting them. absolutely nothing of newsworthy value… (and events at SXSW Interactive reinforce this), but I was pleasantly surprised just how much fun the Kawasaki/Ballmer combination. Yes there was a history between the two people on stage, but it felt unscripted, with nothing off limits - and when those areas were reached Ballmer was pretty good at deflecting the point - everyone in the room knew he was dodging, but he did it well, with humour, sly winks, and the occassional “nope, not going there.”

Microsoft has always traditionally been the big bad, sometimes rightly, but then every company has bads in their make up (yes, even Apple), but Mix08 showed that perhaps Microsoft isn’t going to be the big bad in the next generation of services. As Ballmer pointed out, there’s a lot of kids who don’t know about the OS wars, just knowing Microsoft as the guys behind “XBox and Halo.”

The company is in the middle of that handbrake turn, and it has turned course… where it ends up pointing remains to be seen. Perhaps that will be the message of Mix09?

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