At the annual State of Technology luncheon in Seattle last week, Microsoft‘s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie spoke out about the company, the future of technology and newspapers. Ozzie is known for bashing the company in 2006 for not moving aggressively enough to the Web.
“There are many things you can criticize, but if you look at where (our) products were at the time, how PC-centric, server-centric people’s views were … there has been a dramatic shift (at Microsoft),” he said.
Ozzie noted that the company now has a new set of Web-based offerings, including a hosted version of the Exchange e-mail service released this year and a forthcoming ad-supported version of Office. In 2006, when Ozzie was Microsoft’s chief technical officer, he said that advertising-supported services and software presented a challenge to Microsoft.
Ozzie noted that Microsoft is working on two new businesses and has incubations in health and education, as well as “some work going on in energy,” though he did not provide further details.
Ozzie also touched on the future of newspapers, saying that, “There is a new business model with anything that can be delivered digitally. Look what’s happening with news. I’m not certain what the new business model really is but certainly the old business model is impacted.
“It’s not clear that as these new models come into play whether revenue or profit pool in a given industry is equivalent in the new world as in the old world,” Ozzie continued. “Could very well be that the business model is sound in that there is a business but not the size of the business. If journalism is something we care about we’re going to have to find new ways to subsidize that.”
Ozzie said that the popularity of netbooks is cutting into sales of the Windows operating system, although he was positive about the future potential.
“It’s an incredible opportunity,” he said. “These are sales that might not have occurred. There are markets that are buying PCs now that we have written off.”
Finally, Ozzie said he thinks the next big thing in technology will involve “a world of three screens and a cloud.” He said consumers will all have media and entertainment delivered in a coherent way across something the size of a phone, something the size of a PC and something the size of a TV.
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