Departing executive urges Microsoft to push further into cloud

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

As he prepares to depart from the company, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie issued a memorandum urging the company to continue its move to cloud computing.

In the memo titled Dawn of a New Day, Ozzie stressed the importance of looking to the future and told his colleagues to imagine a world where the PC is replaced by a wealth of simple, low-cost devices that are constantly connected to the internet and to cloud-based services.

“In our industry, if you can imagine something, you can build it,” he wrote. “We at Microsoft know from our common past - even the past five years - that if we know what needs to be done, and if we act decisively, any challenge can be transformed into a significant opportunity. And so, the first step for each of us is to imagine fearless; to dream.”

Microsoft announced Ozzie’s departure in October, five years after Ozzie issued The Internet Services Disruption memo, in which he first called for the company to look into the then-infant cloud computing. Ozzie is credited as the executive who pushed Microsoft to the cloud, as the memo did help the company realize that enterprise and personal computer software was not the goal in an internet-driven world.