REDMOND, Wash., 18 June 2006 — Bill Gates’ decision to give up day-to-day duties at Microsoft Corp. puts more pressure on Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and other executives to figure out the company’s place in an industry increasingly focused on Internet-based services championed by Google Inc. and others.
A large chunk of that responsibility is likely to fall to Ozzie, who is well known in the technology industry but does not have anything close to the pop celebrity status of Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman.
Gates said Thursday that he planned to step back from handling daily responsibilities by July 2008, although he will remain chairman. As part of the changeover, he immediately named Ozzie to take his place as chief software architect, the top technical job at the world’s largest software company.
Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, will continue to run the company. Craig Mundie, another chief technical officer, will oversee Microsoft’s strategy and research. The changing of the guard comes as more companies, including Google and Yahoo Inc., are offering software over the Internet for everything from checking e-mail to collaborating on business proposals. The shift poses a big threat to Microsoft, which makes most of its billions by selling software that runs directly on desktop computers, not a server located somewhere on the Internet. “Microsoft’s biggest nightmare is people living in the browser,” said Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research.
Ozzie, an industry luminary who joined Microsoft in 2005 as a chief technical officer, had already been spearheading the Redmond company’s efforts to offer more online software and services, which Gates has made clear is a top priority.
In an interview Friday, Ozzie said his experience developing Web-based services for his startup Groove Networks Inc. got him excited about the potential for pushing such a change in strategy at Microsoft. “I’m taking this role at a time when we should take a shift as a company to services, to embrace services,” he said. “That’s good, that’s a very positive thing.”
Microsoft recently launched a system for selling online advertising, to try to compete with Google’s juggernaut. And it has been revamping Web-based consumer offerings, such as e-mail, instant messaging and search, under its new Windows Live brand name.
Microsoft also is facing pressure from companies such as Salesforce.com Inc., who offer the type of Web-based business software that could eventually threaten Microsoft’s lucrative business software, including its office suite.
Google also has begun offering word processing and other business software over the Internet. In response, Microsoft is testing Web-based business offerings, dubbed Office Live. But analysts say because the Windows Live and Office Live efforts are still in the early stages, it’s too soon to say how well Microsoft is doing against its more established competitors. “The way that they’ve done it, I think, are steps in the right direction, but there’s not enough publicly available information about what Live is to really assess that yet,” Gartner analyst David Smith said.
