Microsoft's Ray "genius" Ozzie fails. Plan B: Yahoo

Ray Ozzie is the CTO of Microsoft. Ozzie is best known for creating the workgroup product Lotus Notes, and more recently workgroup product Groove. When Bill Gates decided he was going to retire, he decided he wanted Ray Ozzie, who he lionized as a "rare genius," as CTO. So he bought Ray's company, Groove, to get him.

It should have been obvious at the time this scenario would fail.

Microsoft is a company that makes products that require compelling user experiences to succeed. It is, for the most part, a consumer facing software company. And of course the internet is *all* consumer facing. Experience matters.

Ray Ozzie could not have been more ill suited to leading such a company's product development.

Lotus Notes was a product that was never successful as an end user experience. I have never personally been a Notes user as I have always managed to maintain technical free will. But as far as I can tell, force is the only successful means ever employed to expose real human beings to Notes.

Nevertheless, Notes, by any financial measure, was a great success. IT folks loved it. It provided centralized control. Who needs end-user buy in. You will assimilated.

So after the Orwellian success that was Lotus Notes, Ozzie moved on to create Groove. This, I suspect, was a salve for his wealthy soul after creating Notes. Groove was another workgroup tool, but it would be driven, supposedly, by individual users instead of the CIO. Users would *decide* that they wanted to use it.

Only no one decided to use it. No one even understood it, or at least what it would be good for. In fact, famously, Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software called the Groove designers "Architecture Astronauts", meaning they were all about the architecture and far less interested in doing anything that users actually cared about. It was an incredibly famous post that triggered Ozzie himself to respond. Joel seemed to be channeling the entire tech world at the time with a giant WTF.

And so, no one got it. Except perhaps the most important audience of all, Bill Gates. Bill, inexplicably, decided that Ray was the man to lead Microsoft's technology into the future. In an increasingly end user driven world, Bill Gates hired a guy that had never made a product that end users ever actually wanted, as Microsoft's CTO.

And so here we are today. Microsoft is a distant third at best in almost every Internet category they compete in. Microsoft has failed at the Internet. The Yahoo play is just the ultimate "can't hide it now" admission of the obvious. More importantly, Ray Ozzie has failed. But my point here is not just that Ozzie has failed, but that his failure was entirely predictable.

Now Microsoft is running out to buy Yahoo in what would be the second largest tech acquisition after AOL/Time Warner. And indeed that will fail too. It is like attempting to merge a cow egg with hyena sperm in some mad scientist lab. The result will unfortunately, not survive labor.

And so, what of Ozzie. Will he continue to putter around Microsoft spreading fail pixie dust? How long can they continue to throw good money after bad, after bad? I don't know, but it is truly incredibly compelling theatre!