Before getting there, he took the audience on a virtual tour of his career, which reads like a history of the PC, courtesy of Microsoft Virtual Earth.
Beginning at Data General in 1979, Ozzie’s tour took us to Lotus in Cambridge; Iris, the spinoff that Lotus later acquired to build Notes; Groove, for peer-to-peer; and now Microsoft which plans to incorporate some of groove’s technology in Office 2007.
And then he noted what is otherwise general knowledge: that the focus on innovation in IT has shifted from high-end enterprise transaction systems to the consumer space. The latest in hardware and software is more likely to be used by our teenagers than by ourselves, he said.
He then quoted huge numbers, showing hundreds of millions using Windows Live Spaces, Hotmail, and Instant Messenger.
Clearly, building systems at this scale is different than building software for enterprise servers, he said.
He claimed that advancements in handling the consumer internet would rebound back to the enterprise with the emergence of a blend of hosted services with traditional client/server software.
He mentioned that the huge back ends being built for the consumer web would ultimately handle services ranging from augmenting enterprise infrastructure to handle peak loads, providing a more flexible and cheaper successor to EDI networks with B2B services, or promoting team collaboration through shared workspaces.
Microsoft is pushing the Live brand as a way to supplement, not rip out internal software, providing Windows Live search as an example of how hosted services would play a such a supporting role.
Ozzie also pointed to Dynamics AX, the ERP software that Microsoft is making generally available this week. He described capabilities such as performing mashups to rapidly create custom services, or the ability to fuse Dynamics services into familiar platforms like Outlook or syndication technologies like RSS (which will be supported by Windows vista).
In general, Ozzie’s talk was fairly anticlimactic in that it revealed little new about Microsoft’s Live strategy or the thought behind it. And although this year’s TechEd conference was light on announcements, it didn’t measure up to the demonstration of the Unified Messaging platform to come in Exchange 2007.
But the fact that Microsoft was putting Ozzie, not Balmer or Gates at the podium, was excuse enough for thousands of die-hards to give up part of one of the most beautiful weekends in June to pack a convention hall on a Sunday night.
