Alumnus Ray Ozzie Featured in Wired

5/1/2009

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University of Illinois computer science alumnus Ray Ozzie, Chief Software architect at Microsoft, was profiled in a recent issue of Wired. The profile chronicles Ozzie's path from the University of Illinois to the chair once occupied by Bill Gates.

From the article:

On how Ozzie's journey began:

In a sense, Ray Ozzie's remaking of Microsoft began in 1973, when he was a student at the University of Illinois...

Much of Ray's first two years at the Urbana-Champaign campus was frustrating. He spent endless hours submitting punchcards to the technicians who guarded access to the university's mainframe computer. But on his walk across campus he would pass the old CERL building, which housed the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory. It was a plain-looking five-story brick structure with darkened windows, the activities inside hinted at only by strange orange lights. One day, in the spring of his sophomore year, curiosity drew him in, and what he found there shaped the rest of his life.

...Ozzie had discovered Plato, an acronym for programmed logic for automated teaching operations. Though largely forgotten now, it was a system almost absurdly ahead of its time, one of those hidden pockets of innovation that bred a cult of followers who even now will bend your ear with tales of their glory days. Only this time, the tales are true. Concocted by a university engineering professor with the weirdly appropriate name of Don Bitzer, the system comprised several hundred terminals, both on and off campus, connected to a CDC 6400 computer. The goal was "automated learning." But what made Plato irresistible to Ozzie was its interactive nature. Users had direct contact and direct feedback-not just to computers but to one another. "They had this thing called Personal Notes, which you would call email," Ozzie says. "They had this thing called Talkomatic, which is like real-time group chat. And they had this thing called Term-Talk, which was like instant messaging." It was also a way-before-its-time Valhalla of computer gaming. Programmers on the system had gone far beyond the tic-tac-toe and hangman that were popular in other computer centers to pioneer multiplayer online games, notably the Star Trek-inspired Empire. In retrospect, looking at the Plato community was like peeking through a wormhole and viewing the 21st-century Internet.

On how Ozzie came to Microsoft:

Ozzie left IBM and founded a startup called Groove Networks, which made collaborative software. Released in 2001, the Groove app was terrific technology, with peer-to-peer transmission and superstrong crypto built in. But the postbubble timing was awful, and Ozzie realized that the company couldn't make it on its own.

The obvious move was to sell to Microsoft, which had already invested some $50 million in Groove. For Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, however, getting the technology was just a bonus; the real treasure was its founder. Gates had once described Ozzie as "one of the top five programmers in the universe." Former Groove employees still talk about the time Gates visited and the two leaders got off on a tangent about some arcane technical point. As they bounced improvisations off each other, Ozzie coming up with ideas and Gates rocking back and forth with excitement, it was like watching some propellerhead version of a John Coltrane-Miles Davis performance. Ozzie wouldn't be just a great hire--he would be the hire, the one person qualified to be a partner to Gates and Ballmer in revivifying Microsoft.

Mitch Kapor, the former head of Lotus Software, where Ozzie's team created Notes, sums up Ozzie's lifelong quest:

To Ozzie, software's soul does not lie in the accumulation of features. Instead, it lies in his dream of connectivity. "Live Mesh is very Ray," Mitch Kapor says. "It's the son of Groove, which is the son of Notes." Which was, of course, the son of Ozzie's beloved Plato. Thirty-three years later, Ozzie is still trying to build on what he saw in sophomore year. But it's no longer the Ray Ozzie vision. It's Microsoft's.

Read the complete article.


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This story was published May 1, 2009.