The text of Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s speech at Thursday’s Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2006, makes compelling reading. To me it sums up why we’ve moved far beyond the Web 2.0 trend and into something much deeper and richer. Web innovation, which is primarily what my blog explores, is no longer just about Flickr, del.icio.us, the latest video sharing site, or the latest social network on the block. Those things have their place – and other blogs cover them well. But the real action nowadays is where Microsoft, Google and some under-hyped startups are headed… a world of many devices, all connected and managed by the Web. As Ray Ozzie put it near the end of his speech, we’ll look back on this time as when “software and servers and services became enmeshed and intertwined”.
Ozzie recognizes that the Internet is at the center of Microsoft’s vision now. Their particular Internet platform is called Windows Live and this passage from his speech gets to the nitty gritty:
“The services offered up by the Windows Live platform are available to Web sites and also to client applications and also to mobile applications. And this is key to our strategy. Because it’s our aspiration to create seamless Web, desktop and mobile experiences for all activities relevant to users and customers in all our markets.
And our model for doing so is to use our Windows Live services platform as an experience hub, and to use the PC, the browser and mobile devices as different experience-delivery mechanisms for the value we aspire to deliver.
In other words, Microsoft is using Windows Live as a hub to bring it all together.”
The Hub Diagram, from Ray Ozzie’s speech
The phrase “experience hub” has gotten a lot of attention these past couple of days, but the main takeaway is that Windows Live is the platform that Microsoft will use to base its entire business on over the coming years.
Indeed Ozzie explicitly calls Microsoft “a platform company” near the end of his speech. Remember, in Gates’ era they were a software company – although Steve Ballmer has also called Microsoft a media company in recent times. But a platform company is definitely the best description of Microsoft now, even though software remains their trump card.
I was also intrigued by Ozzie’s use of the term “optimization” to explain what essentially has been a central tenet of the Web 2.0 trend. Ozzie said:
“But beyond infrastructure services, what’s most unique and valuable about a very large-scale services platform is what I’ll refer to as optimization. By optimization I mean the monitoring and utilization of both collective end-user behavior and individual behavior to rank content for the user. That ranked content might be the order of advertisements in a search or e-mail window, or the order of relevant news items or playlists or video clips or items in a marketplace that are presented to the user.
We see the power of optimization every day in the relevancy of search engines and on Web sites such as Digg or Reddit and YouTube and Amazon.”
This is Microsoft’s way of saying they’ll aggregate collective intelligence, filter and rank it, personalize it, yada yada (we’ve heard this song many times before over the past year or so). But actually I like the term ‘optimization’, because of its software connotations.
The term ‘seamlessness’ also pops up a lot in Ozzie’s speech, recognizing that there will be a multitude of devices in this new services world. Note that I personally still think the Web browser has a big part to play in this world, as it is our lowest common denominator Internet-connected device (I ranted on that topic in a ZDNet post yesterday).
So in summary, I’m impressed by Ray Ozzie’s vision. I love that Microsoft is spelling out their vision to the world too – and IMHO lifting the whole ‘Web 2.0’ concept up a notch. Of course Google is also pursuing the same kind of vision, only they leave it up to us to figure out what they’re up to. Yahoo, Apple and others like Amazon.com are also players in this Internet-based services world. Plus a whole host of startups – and I’m not talking about social bookmarking sites or blog search engines! I’ll be exploring some of the truly innovative and interesting startups in the coming months on Read/WriteWeb.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)