Microsoft must look beyond the PC

Last week Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer sent an email to employees announcing the departure of Ray Ozzie (pictured), the man that took over from Bill Gates in the software department.

Ozzie has posted a lengthy blog on where he thinks Microsoft strategy must lie.

“What’s happened in every aspect of computing & communications over the course of the past five years has given us much to dream about,” he wrote. “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’.”

Ozzie said that we’re moving toward a world of cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding as well as appliance-like connected devices that enable us to interact with those cloud-based services.

“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,” Ozzie continued.

For the ultimate end goal to be realised Ozzie argues that an amazing level of coherence across apps, services and devices will be required. “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.”

We’re not even close yet though.

“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.”

You can read the full post, titled ‘Dawn of a new day’ here.