Ray Ozzie was a quiet presence in Redmond, but he left deep footprints throughout Microsoft's global operation that will last for years.
Ozzie is stepping down as chief software architect and preparing to retire, according to an employee e-mail that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent out Monday.
"He will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization -- bringing the great innovations and great innovators he's assembled into the groups driving our business," Ballmer wrote. "Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments."
Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 when the company bought Groove Networks and took on Bill Gates' secondary title of chief software architect a year later as part of the Gates' retirement transition plan. Ozzie was said to have been most comfortable working in small groups and sharing ideas on a whiteboard, and he reportedly suffered from stage fright before large crowds. He made a huge splash early with the Internet Services Disruption memo that he wrote and that Gates forwarded to the rest of the company. But since then, except for a few high-profile magazine profiles and a handful of speeches and interviews, he has largely faded from the public eye.
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| Source: Microsoft |
With Ozzie's history in collaboration, especially with Lotus Notes and Groove Networks, some look for his effect in Microsoft's collaboration technologies, and find his influence wanting. But that misses Ozzie's main task, which was to help Microsoft bridge the gap from 1990s dominance to 21st century relevance. Ozzie found that bridge in the cloud and worked relatively quietly, but steadily, on the project.
Ozzie's largest and most tangible footprints are the massive datacenters that Microsoft has been building since 2007. Media reports described Ozzie poring over reports on available electricity and other factors in choosing sites for the facilities. Meanwhile, Microsoft has received notice for innovations in datacenter design around cooling and power consumption. So far, Microsoft now has mega-datacenters costing about $500 million each in Quincy, Wash.; San Antonio, Texas; Dublin, Ireland; and Chicago. Officials in Virginia recently announced another facility coming in the southern Virginia lakeside town of Boydton.
Smaller Ozzie footprints will be evident in the Windows Azure Platform Appliance containers, a strategic advance which could help Microsoft spread its cloud to organizations around the world where laws, regulation or policy require data to reside inside national borders or organizational walls.
Ozzie's other footprints are evident in the array of cloud services Microsoft now offers across nearly its entire product base. Ballmer acknowledged as much in his company-wide e-mail.
"As a company, we've accomplished much in the past five years as we look at the cloud and services. Windows Live now serves as a natural web-based services complement to both Windows and Office. SharePoint and Exchange have now decidedly embraced the cloud. And by conceiving, incubating and shepherding Windows Azure, Ray helped ensure we have a tremendously rich platform foundation that will enable app-level innovation across the company and by customers for years to come."
"With our progress in services and the cloud now full speed ahead in all aspects of our business, Ray and I are announcing today Ray's intention to step down from his role as chief software architect," Ballmer wrote.
Ozzie's was nothing less than a visionary transformation of Microsoft, fully in line with the title of chief software architect. Ballmer says the position isn't being refilled.
The time for setting the cloud vision and planning the datacenter infrastructure to support the vision is passed. Ozzie's finished that job, and, frankly, given his personality, he's not the right person for the next part – evangelizing and selling Microsoft's cloud. Ballmer has been taking up that baton aggressively .See his speeches in March ("we're all in"), at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference ("Oh, cloud") and this month ("cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud").
To paraphrase the quote famously attributed to Ben Franklin about a republic, Ray Ozzie has given Microsoft a potential leadership position in cloud computing, if Microsoft can keep it.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 19, 20100 comments
Microsoft is going wild with the "president" title. Just last week, CEO Steve Ballmer took the opportunity presented by one departing president (Stephen Elop) to bestow the big title on three people. The new presidents are Don. Mattrick (Interactive Entertainment Business), Kurt DelBene (Microsoft Office Division) and Andy Lees (Mobile Communications Business). Congratulations are in order for all three of these executives, of course.
Call me old school, but, to me, president and CEO are basically one title. You pick one or the other and everybody else is some grade of VP. Microsoft's title conventions are starting to remind of the "but it goes to 11" bit from the movie Spinal Tap.
A cursory review of the Microsoft Executive Biographies page reveals seven presidents now. In addition to the three new ones, there's Steven Sinofsky (Windows & Windows Live Division), Bob Muglia (Server & Tools Business), Qi Lu (Online Services Division) and Jean-Philippe Courtois (Microsoft International).
That's not counting those who have president or CEO or chairman as some part of their titles, in many cases for the legitimate purposes of running a subsidiary. That category includes Robert Youngjohns, senior vice president and president, North America Sales & Marketing; Umberto Paolucci, senior chairman, Microsoft EMEA (he's also a corporate vice president); Yasuyuki Higuchi, president & CEO, Microsoft Co. Ltd., Japan (he's also a corporate vice president); and Simon Leung, corporate vice president and chairman and CEO, Microsoft Greater China Region.
On a more consequential note, the Microsoft Business Solutions (Dynamics) product group is being moved out of the Microsoft Office Division. CVP Kirill Tatarinov runs Dynamics and will report directly to Ballmer. Does this mean, we'll start to see hard figures for the Dynamics business in Microsoft's quarterly filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission? I'm keeping my fingers crossed for greater transparency, but I wouldn't be surprised if the results remain buried under other line items.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 04, 20101 comments
Microsoft is quietly building out a partner catalog in the two-week-old Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace, a beta version of Microsoft's answer to the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference in July that it would be launching the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace in September. A Microsoft spokesperson said the intention all along was to launch a beta in September, not the full-fledged portal for customer-partner connections.
"Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace went into beta on Sept. 16 and is a searchable repository of custom solutions and extensions to help accelerate and/or extend the value of Microsoft Dynamics. This beta is an important milestone on the road to the final delivery of the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace service later this year and available in English and German in eight countries including the United States, the U.K., Canada, India, Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Austria," the spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
"Today customers have the ability to discover, download and try applications as well as directly connect with partners and service providers if they decide to purchase an application. We are also encouraging partners to sign up to be part of this service as well as upload their solutions onto this service to give customers a broad choice of solutions to meet their specific business needs when the service goes live," the spokesperson said.
There is measurable momentum within the Dynamics Marketplace beta, which the company announced to partners and customers on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Team Blog on Sept. 20. We've heard Microsoft has been driving Dynamics ISVs hard to get their CRM applications listed. We've also heard from partners that Microsoft's push will extend to the ERP channel sometime after the first of the year.
For now, text on the beta homepage is currently entirely CRM-focused: "The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is an online service from Microsoft to help you: Get expert help to deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Find a service provider to host and manage your CRM solutions. Discover applications tailored for your individual business needs."
Customers will be able to search broadly for applications, professional services or companies. As of Sept. 30, the beta's directory included 233 application listings, 413 professional services offerings and 392 company listings.
Although the CRM Team Blog announcing the beta points users to www.microsoft.com/dynamics/marketplace, the page redirects to a Pinpoint URL (dynamics.pinpoint.microsoft.com). According to the beta site's About section, "The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is the first of several product marketplaces to rollout in 2010 and 2011 that will be powered by Pinpoint search engines." So, love Pinpoint or hate it, that's what runs the new Dynamics Marketplace.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20100 comments
The case surrounding Stuxnet, which some security and intelligence specialists are calling the first known precision malware weapon designed to bring down a specific real-world industrial facility, is getting curiouser.
As researchers untangled the encryption and complex code base, suspicion has grown that Stuxnet was created by U.S. or Israeli intelligence in order to disrupt a specific Iranian nuclear facility. (RCP unpacked Stuxnet's nasty implications for the Microsoft channel in a blog post earlier this week. The worm uses four zero-day Windows vulnerabilities as part of its attack.)
A front-page article in The New York Times today moves the story forward with news that the text string "Myrtus," found within the Stuxnet code, is at the center of much of the debate about who might be behind Stuxnet's development.
According to the Times: "Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively."
The debate, according to the newspaper, currently centers on whether an Esther reference is the correct interpretation of the Stuxnet code string, and if so, whether it represents a smoking gun or a red herring. This case is as subtle and fascinating as a John Le Carre novel.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20102 comments
Microsoft is supposed to flip the switch for many of the most significant elements of its Microsoft Partner Network sometime in October, a month which, you may have noticed, is upon us.
But October 2011 is shaping up as a key month for the MPN as well. In a document on the public portion of Microsoft's Partner Portal called "Prepare for the Microsoft Partner Network," the year-ahead month crops up several times.
It's especially relevant to partners concerned about the MPN transition away from the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and the Microsoft Certified Partner levels. While partners won't be able to re-enroll in the Microsoft Partner Network at those levels after the switch happens at some unspecified date this October -- they will be able to hang onto the logos for awhile.
According to the site: "Continue to use the logos you have today. After October 2011, the current Certified Partner and Gold Certified Partner logos will be retired since we're shifting to silver competencies and gold competencies. All partners must discontinue their use of these old logos by October 2011."
That said, the old logos won't be available for download after October 2010 for partners who haven't already obtained them.
How do you view this policy? Is it a nod to the challenges of distributing new branding to a massive network of partners? Or is it an opportunity to lobby Microsoft for another 12 months to reverse its decision to retire the Gold Certified Partner and Certified Partner levels? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20101 comments
Microsoft this week is introducing a sensible addition to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite -- an uptime dashboard.
Called the Microsoft Online Service Health Dashboard, the online display shows the status of various BPOS components in green (good), yellow (slow) and red (down) icons. A Microsoft screenshot of the dashboard shows the tool monitoring subscription services including Exchange Online Mailflow, Exchange Online Outlook Connectivity, Exchange Online ActiveSync, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, Hosted BlackBerry, Outlook Web Access, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting. The tool also monitors BPOS administrative services, and partner-specific cuts of data are available.
Charles Van Heusen, a partner technology advisor with Microsoft's TS2 Team, announced the tool in a blog posting Wednesday covered by my colleague Kurt Mackie.
Heusen wrote that the tool is designed to answer the question, "How do we know when there are service interruptions from the Online services verses networking issues with our own service provider or our network"?
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20100 comments
An odd thing has been happening in the Microsoft channel over the last few years. Every Microsoft partner we ask tells us they're getting less marketing money and other direct investments from Redmond than they got in the past. Yet every year, the amount Microsoft says it invests in the channel goes up.
After the Worldwide Partner Conference, we thought that maybe this year Microsoft had given up on the storyline of ever-increasing partner investments. The usual bearer of the good news, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner, didn't mention partner investments in his WPC keynote, sticking, instead, to data points about research and development investment. (He said that could reach $9.5 billion in Microsoft's FY 2011.)
It was Turner's WPC speech in 2009 that Microsoft used to announce a $3.3 billion investment in partners for FY '10. The year before, the company said it was spending $2.9 billion, and the year before that, $2.3 billion.
But Microsoft is kicking around another big number for 2011 after all. According to a statement on Microsoft's Partner Portal, "Microsoft has always been committed to partners and invests over $4 billion per year -- more than any other technology company." That would be a massive $700 million increase year-over-year.
Unlike last year when I wrote a similar, head-scratching post about Microsoft's stated level of partner investment, I do have a theory this year. I'll flesh it out in RCP's November issue. Stay tuned!
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20100 comments
Over the last week, security researchers have revealed progress in untangling the fiendishly complex encryption and massive code base of the Stuxnet malware -- and what they say they've found is one of the most interesting developments in the computer security landscape in years.
The Christian Science Monitor online newspaper last week reported, "Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world -- to destroy something."
The Monitor article was primarily based on interviews with German cyber-security researcher Ralph Langner, ahead of a speech Langner gave on Stuxnet in Rockville, Md. last week. Langner and his Hamburg-based team have been reverse engineering Stuxnet, which emerged in June, but is only now yielding some of its secrets.
"With the forensics we now have it is evident and provable that Stuxnet is a directed sabotage attack involving heavy insider knowledge," Langer wrote on his Web site.
Although thousands of systems have been infected by the worm, which combined four zero-day Windows flaws, the picture that is emerging now is that all but one of those systems may be collateral damage.
According to Langner's analysis, Stuxnet was one piece in a military/intelligence operation conducted by a technically sophisticated nation state to target and destroy one specific real-world facility by compromising industrial process control software via a contractor's infected USB memory stick. Langner speculated that the target may have been Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. Other reports suggest other Iranian facilities involved in the nuclear weapons production arena.
Over the weekend, an Iranian official was quoted as saying the worm was "part of the electronic warfare against Iran." An article in The New York Times on Sunday quoted James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, saying that the United States is "one of four or five places that could have done it -- the Israelis, the British and the Americans are the prime suspects, then the French and Germans, and you can't rule out the Russians and the Chinese."
The nation-state perpetrator theory isn't unanimous, however. John Pescatore, vice president for internet security at Gartner, told The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom that it was "definitely not the case" that Stuxnet would have required state sponsorship.
A Headache for Partners
Microsoft appears to be in full panic mode about Stuxnet. Witness RCPU Editor Lee Pender's innocuous recent link to a Stuxnet item that prompted an immediate reply from Microsoft. The Microsoft response to Stuxnet is justifiably alarmist because the case threatens to reinvigorate a host of thorny, but largely dormant, issues about Windows security, proprietary source code, state security and even possible Microsoft collusion with United States' government intelligence agencies. As Microsoft's front line for sales and end user services, Microsoft partners will be the ones taking fire.
At a base level, all Microsoft partners involved with supporting customers on Windows need to understand the basics of the Microsoft Stuxnet bulletins and patches, and it's a good time to re-evaluate security policies and protections around USB sticks.
A Manufacturing Problem
Manufacturing integrators and ISVs, meanwhile, have a new set of concerns. Stuxnet provides a step-by-step guide for taking over a programmable logic controller (PLC) on an industrial control system. Anybody involved in installing or programming control systems will need to be ready to address and explain the threat.
According to Langner, it's not technically difficult to inject what he calls "rogue ladder logic" into PLC programs. (The rogue ladder logic affects the industrial control software, in this case Siemens, not Windows.)
"It is important to understand that this vulnerability cannot be considered a bug, either technically or legally, so it should not be expected that vendors would be able to release a 'patch,'" Langner said on his site.
Langner predicted that exploit code based on vulnerabilities used by Stuxnet will make their way into known frameworks like Metasploit within a few months. "The Stuxnet story will raise a lot of attention in the hacker community where people may now start to try using the attack vector for much more trivial motivations than we must assume for the Stuxnet writers," he warned.
Langner also listed a number of basic security procedures that manufacturing integrators can re-emphasize with customers that would help prevent a Stuxnet-style attack from reaching critical control systems. They included defining and enforcing a high security level for engineering stations, especially mobile ones; prohibiting staff from using the stations for private purposes; securing the systems with whitelisting solutions; defining and enforcing a high security level for contractors; removing shared folders; removing critical systems from the network; reviewing policies for remote access; implementing a zoning concept for the network; and using PLC version control systems.
Reviving Political Questions
The biggest Stuxnet problems for Microsoft, however, are what we'll call the political issues. And these will be problems for Microsoft's global systems integrators, global ISVs and Microsoft partners in the international subsidiaries, although U.S.-based partners with highly security conscious customers can expect to be dragged into these conversations, as well.
Microsoft faces four intertwined political issues. Two of them arise from being a multinational corporation headquartered within the world's most powerful nation state. Several years ago, Microsoft faced pushback from China about whether it was appropriate for Chinese government, military and business computers to run on an operating system created in another country. Related to that issue is the persistent rumor that Microsoft has either voluntarily or under duress created a backdoor for the U.S. National Security Agency to gain access to Windows-based computers. This rumor comes up at every OS release, including with Windows 7, and Microsoft takes it seriously enough to issue formal statements denying any backdoor.
While much of the early speculation points to Israel as the source of the worm, NSA involvement is a close second. The New York Times reported that former President George W. Bush had authorized efforts to undermine electrical systems, computer networks and other networks that serve Iran's nuclear programs, and the paper reported that the efforts have been ramped up under the Obama Administration. The combination of NSA suspicion and Windows flaws should give new life to international conspiracy theories about collusion. (When it comes to talking a strong stand against government encroachment, Microsoft didn't help its case any here with the recent revelations that Russian authorities piggybacked on Microsoft's software piracy campaign to crack down on dissident groups.)
The other political issues involve the technology fights within the IT community. The whole Stuxnet incident will be another data point in reviving arguments that Windows is less secure than other operating systems. Meanwhile, the issue is new grist for open source advocates, who will use the case to argue that Microsoft's proprietary approach to its code is a problem.
Let's all keep our fingers crossed that Microsoft wasn't short-sighted enough to cooperate in any way with a national authority in keeping zero-day exploits open. It would have been colossally stupid, and there's no need -- smaller actors than nation states find zero-day exploits in Windows software often enough. Put some dedicated resources and talent behind an effort and success in finding new zero-day exploits is a matter of time.
Probably the best line of defense for partners in all of the above circumstances is to be familiar with the string of Stuxnet-specific security responses from the Microsoft Security Response Center, and be ready to point to the generally positive notices that Microsoft has been receiving lately about the speed and thoroughness of their security responses.
In any case, Microsoft partners will need to pull those Microsoft-provided security playbooks off the shelves where they've been collecting dust for the last couple of years. Thanks to Stuxnet, the political disputes around Microsoft software are about to get hot again.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 27, 20102 comments
The Forbes 400 list of the Richest People in America came out Wednesday and it lists Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on top once again, with $54 billion. As Forbes puts it, "The software king is not the world's richest man, but that's because he is the most generous person on the planet: To date he has cut checks totaling $28 billion."
The Gates fortune is up $4 billion from a year ago, but down $3 billion from 2008 and down $5 billion from 2007, according to Forbes. While Gates' money seems to be working its way back toward those peaks, it remains above the relative trough it occupied for most of the 2000s, when it dipped as low -- if that's really the right word -- as $43 billion, according to Forbes' figures.
Others who owe their fortunes to Microsoft in the Forbes 400 include Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, ranked No. 16 with $13.1 billion, and cofounder Paul Allen, No. 17 with $12.7 billion. The closest technologist in net worth to Gates is Oracle founder Larry Ellison, ranked No. 3 at $27 billion. Gates' bridge and philanthropy buddy, Warren Buffett, provides a welcome buffer on the Forbes list between the two technology billionaires, who frequently stand on opposite sides of technology fights.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20100 comments
I was gearing up to jump down Microsoft's throat late last week after I saw Twitter traffic from Microsoft partners reporting that they were getting error messages when trying to use the new Internet Explorer 9 beta on the Microsoft Partner Portal. To quote Wayne Beekman's tweet early Thursday, "Installed #IE9 and @microsoft Partner Member Center Page will not load …"
Partners are urged constantly by Microsoft to test Microsoft's beta software aggressively so they can represent said software equally aggressively to customers.
Well, it turns out that Microsoft didn't mean for the Partner Portal to reject IE9. An RCP test on Friday with IE9 on the portal worked fine. Eric Ligman, Microsoft's Global Partner Experience Lead, sent out a series of Tweets Friday afternoon to Beekman and other partners Friday afternoon reporting that the issue had been fixed.
Later Friday evening, a Microsoft spokesperson e-mailed a reply to a question about the issue that I had posed that morning. According to the e-mail, "The MS Partner Portal issue you flagged this morning was not related to IE9 compatibility, but instead, was caused by a minor configuration file issue that was quickly fixed by our Web team. At this point, the issue has been resolved and partners should be able to access the MS Partner Portal as normal."
Am I thrilled that the Partner Portal wasn't completely ready for duty when the IE9 beta hit testers last week? No. But this kind of thing is what beta periods are for, at least for companies not named Google. I'm very glad to see that the Microsoft Partner Portal, an important resource, is fully part of the Microsoft roadmap for new technologies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20100 comments
It appears that the Windows Intune Beta 2 was pretty popular.
In a blog post this week, Alex Heaton, group product manager for Windows Intune, announced that Microsoft is no longer accepting new users for the Windows Intune testing program, which entered the Beta 2 phase on July 12.
Windows Intune is a cloud-based version of the desktop management capabilities customers could previously get by deploying Microsoft System Center technologies. Microsoft is positioning the product as both an end-user focused tool for midsize organizations' IT departments and as a tool for managed services providers to use to manage and secure their customers' environments. We covered the issues and potential surrounding the product's viability as an MSP tool in the September issue.
"Current beta participants can continue to use the Windows Intune beta and provide feedback until the next release," Heaton wrote in his blog. "We expect Windows Intune to be generally available in 2011."
Those interested in notifications of future Windows Intune releases can sign up here.
So how popular has Intune been? Microsoft opened the first beta on April 19 and filled the 1,000 tester slots in less than 24 hours. The company expanded the scope of the second beta to 10,000 testers and opened the registration from North American-only to include several European countries. Presumably, Microsoft has now filled those 10,000 slots.
Microsoft hasn't said how many of the testers are IT end users and how many are partners, taking advantage of features like the MSP-focused Multi-Account Console that was introduced in the Beta 2 phase.
Do you hold one of the coveted Beta 2 spots? I'd like to hear about your experiences with the Beta 2 of Windows Intune at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20100 comments
It's an exciting time for the Microsoft Small Business Specialist Community. The testing and rollout phase of a new version of Windows Small Business Server always promises new opportunities, but this year, Microsoft is experimenting with different formats for the product.
Microsoft released a public preview on Tuesday for the next version of SBS, code-named Windows Small Business Server "7." The product itself is the basic update that usually follows an upgrade of the underlying server. In this case the upgraded server is Windows Server 2008 R2.
Major features of SBS 7 include the first service pack for Microsoft Exchange 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, improved security and management, better file and print handling and simplified procedures for providing Internet and e-mail access to end users.
But this test version of the successor to Small Business Server 2008 is the second small business server of the new generation to go to the community. A month ago, a preview version went out for "Aurora," a cloud computing-enabled version of SBS for companies with fewer than 25 users. Stay tuned for a technical review of Aurora in the October issue of Redmond Channel Partner magazine from J. Peter Bruzzese.
Microsoft intends Aurora as a "first server" for the smallest customers, giving partners another potential tool, along with peer-to-peer networking and the Business Productivity Online Suite, to crack this often-hard-to-reach market. SBS 7 will accommodate firms with up to 75 users. Meanwhile, a previous example of Microsoft's constant tinkering with its mix of products for this space, the short-lived Windows Essentials Business Server, was recently discontinued for organizations that are just a bit larger than the typical SBS customer. For those small midsize customers, it's back to the full stack of Microsoft servers.
See Kurt Mackie's coverage of the SBS 7 preview launch.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 22, 20100 comments