Ray Ozzie at Web 2.0: Vista, Office, Etc.
Eventful week for Microsoft--on Monday, it announced that it had released Office 2007 to manufacturing, and today's it's saying the same for Windows Vista.
I'm still at the Web 2.0 Summit, and at the moment, host John Battelle is interviewing Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect. Ozzie is tacitly agreeing with my colleague Denny Arar's take that the RTM version of Vista is a sort of "Vista 1.0" that will quickly be supplanted by a version with various patches, fixes, and enhancements.
Vista, Ozzie says, "is not perfect." He's also describing it as, principally, a secure platform for using the Web, which is an interesting thing to hear from a Microsoft exec, since it acknowledges that the Net is, increasingl, where stuff gets done these days.
Battelle just asked Ozzie about when we'll be able to use applications like Microsoft Word in some sort of Web-native form. Ozzie's answer isn't terribly specific--he's saying that a good browser-based word processor shouldn't just be a clone of a dekstop app (true) and that PC software is still good at rich interfaces and usefulness when disconnected (also true). Ozzie says that the Web will "just nail" collaborative productivity tasks like sharing lists.
An attendee is asking what Windows and Office will look like in five years. Ozzie's saying the product groups will determine that, but he thinks that for Office, the explosion of phones and other mobile devices, and the general pervasiveness of the Web, provide a big opportunity. For Vista, he's saying, the move from multi-core to "many-core" systems means that Vista will need to help programmers make use of all that power. And he's saying that power management provides lots of opportunity for innovation.
Another attendee is asking about Microsoft's product activation policies, specifically tying Windows Genuine Advantage to IE7. Is it a good idea?
"I don't know," Ozzie says.
A third attendee is asking about whether Microsoft plans to compete with Adobe's PDF format. Ozzie, making oblique reference to the fact that built-in PDF support was originally planned for Office 2007, says he thinks customers would like native PDF in Office. And he's saying, basically, that there's a need for PDF-type stuff in the world, but whether PDF or Microsoft's XPS will prevail.
And here's an attendee asking why Microsoft's Zune music player won't support PlaysForSure music. Ozzie says that the goal with Zune was to get a good device with an end-to-end music experience out quickly, and implementing PlaysForSure would have been a challenge. But it's possible it may work with PlaysForSure eventually. Maybe.
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I think that its sort of ironic that their Zune player doesn't include their own PlaysForSure. After all. when I was shopping for an MP3 player, they made it sound like I shouldn't buy one that didn't include PlaysForSure.