Microsoft's departing chief software architect Ray Ozzie has warned the company that the world is entering a post-PC era, and it must adapt more quickly or be left behind.
In a memo to Microsoft employees, Ozzie said the shift beyond the PC to the cloud was inevitable.
“As a direct byproduct of the PC's success...the PC-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity,” he said. “Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.”
He said the industry was undergoing a “wholesale reconfiguration in the way we perceive and apply technology.”
Just as the simplicity and approachability were key to the success of the PC, the combination of always-on broadband and connected devices would eventually deliver the same benefits.
“It may take quite a while to happen, but I believe that in some form or another, without doubt, it will,” he wrote.
Ozzie reiterated his call that Microsoft's future was in cloud-centric services delivered through these connected devices.
But he implied that Microsoft will have to step up its game, stating that the company has been on the back foot to its competitors in parts of the services space.
“Certain of our competitors'... execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware and software and services, and in social networking and internet-centric social interaction,” he said.
Ozzie said dramatic changes had taken place over the last five years – “substantial business ecosystems have collapsed as many classic aggregation & distribution mechanisms no longer make sense.”
He predicted similar disruptions over the next five years, “catalyzed by the huge and inevitable shift in apps and infrastructure that's truly now just begun.”
While he said the PC ecosystem will keep growing for a long time to come, such a change would undoubtedly threaten to Microsoft's traditional software cash cow.
Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005, resigned suddenly last week and will leave the company shortly. His memo from that year is credited as convincing the company of the importance of cloud computing.