Posts tagged as: ozzie

Is Windows relevant in a Web 2.0 world?

There has already been a lot written about Ray Ozzie's idea for "wiring the web" with a clipboard model for transferring XML data between web pages. I'm willing to accept Marc Canter's opinion that it is really cool. Frankly I don't think we'll know how useful it is until it is really used on a lot of pages. It certainly is one of those classic chicken and egg problems. It doesn't just work all by itself. Pages must be customized to accept it, and there won't be any reason to provide places to paste data until there is data that can be copied.

What I find interesting is why Ozzie thinks this is so important. The best answer I can come up with is that he is trying to prove that Windows will still be relevant after applications largely move from the desktop to web pages. Will Windows be little more than a browser launcher? If a computer came out that just ran a tabbed web browser, would most users even need Windows? Of course, this is a long-term question, but Microsoft moves so slowly that it can pretty much only worry about long-term problems. I think Ozzie's Live Clipboard idea may be just one in a long line of new Windows features that prove that a full desktop operating system is necessary to provide a complete infrastructure for a Web user.

The same analogy keeps suggesting itself to me. What if someone actually invented a flying car that we were all promised would be here by this century? Not only would manufacturers of earthbound cars (read desktop apps) be in serious trouble, but so would the companies that build and maintain roads (read Windows). Why have roads when you just take off from your house and land in a parking lot at your destination? A smart road builder would come up with compelling reasons why people still need roads. You may require somewhere to land your aircar in emergencies, or maybe roads would be places where passengers could change from one aircar to another.

This may seem like a silly analogy, but to tell you the truth I find the live clipboard as conceived by Ozzie a little silly myself. Why can't this just be a built-in function of the browser? Why do we need to modify every page to enable the transfer of specific chunks of data? If it worked without any outside help from the operating system, I might believe it had less to do with proving that an operating system is still relevant.

Dave Winer has the best week ever

Ever since I became aware of the Web 2.0 meme I've been telling people that Dave Winer was one of the pivotal forces behind this new wave, maybe the central force. Everyone would have to admit that with GoogleBase turning out to be the world's biggest RSS database, and Ray Ozzie announcing Microsoft's synchronization and replication protocol based on RSS, Dave Winer is having the best week ever! Ozzie's announcement letter can only be described as effusive in his praise of Winer's role:

Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it. My question is what comes next Dave? What are you working on for the wave after this, because I think this one is going to be pretty condensed.

Lest anyone reading this get the wrong idea, I should also make it clear that Dave and I haven't spoken in a couple of years and I'm hardly a sycophant, but that doesn't diminish my estimate of his influence on where the computer industry is headed. For right or wrong, we're riding the RSS train now.

Disruption is the new Disintermediation

The impetus for the latest round of Microsoft naysayers was a pair of memos from Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates. Dave Winer published the complete text of both documents, and they are well worth reading. What I found most interesting is the way they captured the current "Disruptive" zeitgeist. Ozzie's October 28th memo is titled "The Internet Services Disruption," and Gates declares to his troops that "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," in his response on October 30th.

There is clear evidence on Blogpulse that "Disruptive" is gaining favor among the blognoscenti.

Wikipedia tells me that "disruptive technology" was coined by Clay Christensen (from Harvard of course) in 1997 during the run-up to the Web 1.0 boom, but it looks like it will reach a peak with Web 2.0. My own Harvard training tells me that this phrase is a terrible example of technological determinism. Technologies don't "do" anything, people do things with technology, if a host of circumstances are just right. I also can't help but notice how gendered a term this is. Women cooperate, men disrupt, like a bunch of little boys on a playground smashing each others forts.