Ray Ozzie’s Dawn of a New Day
I would recommend everyone interested in technology to read Ray Ozzie’s (Chief Software Architect of Microsoft) memo - “Dawn of a New Day”. It’s a fascinating insight into the vision of a key player in the industry and a call to arms for Microsoft and it’s partners. What interests me the most about this vision is that it is a conceivable vision and one that I share. This vision of “appliance-like connected devices” being the norm and consuming “Cloud Based Continuous Services” is one that is easy to visualise as this day is dawning now around us. Smart phones, tablets, connected TVs etc are set to become the principle means of interacting with our online world.
“Complexity kills”
Whenever I’m called upon to help out family and friends with their PCs it often strikes me how inappropriate these machines are for the needs of the basic user. The power and complexity of the PC is it’s great power but it also makes them often too difficult to manage and secure. Huge numbers of basic PC users now in reality only use their browser and don’t install software applications anymore. These people are also now enjoying the simplicity provided by smart phone OS’s such as Android and iOS. In fact many of these users are able to fulfil their needs via App Stores etc whilst their PCs gradually gather dust. the future vision where devices rule makes total sense. Whilst Apple is proving the master in the device market Microsoft have the ‘Windows’ advantage. The failure of Linux netbooks to maintain market share shows that given similar pricing models consumers will stick with the familiarity and safe option of Windows, and this is an opportunity for Microsoft. They could capitalise on this with a lean “appliance like” version of Windows in the future.
“Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. “ - I have seen numerous projects needlessly suffer in delivery due to overly complex designs, sometimes from overly complex requirements. Because we can create software to be configurable and feature rich we feel we have to, but of course every additional feature brings additional overhead. This overhead my be felt by the end user or perhaps just the developer and testers trying to implement or test the features.
“Cloud-based continuous services”
Ray’s vision of cloud services being continuous is key for the connected future. Consumers need to be able to depend on the cloud always being available and willing to serve them. As these services grow in importance they will be expected to grow in number and complexity. This is a real challenge for industry engineers and we really need to learn the lessons of the hugely scalable consumer web sites such as Facebook and Google. I look forward to seeing what technologies are produced to aid the development of these services and which scalability patterns move towards the mainstream.
It’s an exciting future for our industry and one that I look forward to playing my part in.