Microsoft Chief Software Architect Pushes Clouds

By Doug Barney

A couple of years ago Ray Ozzie took Bill Gate’s place as Chief Software Architect at Redmond-based Microsoft Corp. As soon as he started, Ozzie started talking up services — and in order to do services right you need a proper cloud.

This is one reason Microsoft is so anxious to buy Yahoo!.

Ozzie, who rarely gives interviews (I was lucky enough to talk to him right after he joined Microsoft), sat down with Om Malik, the blogger behind GigaOM, to give a Microsoft view of cloud computing.

Microsoft promises better tools to build Web services, and is actually off to a good start with Silverlight, a new platform for easily creating rich Web apps. It also pledges to extend these concepts to mashups, easing the creation of composite apps.

And of course, Microsoft has its own cloud which houses Windows Live services and MSN, and here there is work to do to insure the cloud is stable and doesn’t have the kind of outages that have plagued Hotmail (now called Windows Live Hotmail, snappy name, eh?) and other services.

And lastly, Microsoft needs a new, more Internet-savvy desktop operating system. Heck, I’d just be happy to have one that doesn’t crash!

Who is your favorite computer luminary, Gates, Jobs, Linus Torvalds? Let us know by writing [email protected].

http://gigaom.com/2008/03/10/the-gigaom-interview-ray-ozzie-microsoft-corp/