Can Microsoft possibly live up to the expectations it has built around it’s Professional Developer Conference, which starts here in Los Angeles today? As Microsoft-watcher Mary Jo Foley says, virtually any question put to an exec of the software company over the past year has been met with the response: “You’ll find out more at PDC.”
This is meant to be Ray Ozzie’s coming-out party. Three years after joining Microsoft, he needs to prove that he has a plan capable of shifting the company’s centre of gravity to the Web.
It won’t be easy. Microsoft has a habit of building up to big moments like this and then leaving its audience hungry for more, as Nick Carr put it to me the other day (Carr’s latest book, The Big Switch, is the best read so far about the significance of the shift to “cloud” computing.)
Ozzie laid the groundwork for today’s event in this speech at Microsoft’s annual meeting with financial analysts last year. The picture he sketched out at that time was certainly ambitious. The Web-based computing platform he envisaged has a number of layers, starting with a base of massive datacenters which Microsoft, like Google, has been racing to build. On top of this rests what he called a “cloud infrastructure services layer” – the most basic layer of software that spreads the computing load across datacentres and servers, parcels out storage capacity and manages the network.
The next layer up he termed “Live platform services” – software that handles a range of services needed to support Web applications for consumers and small businesses. These services are things like identity management, a user’s ”social graph” of personal connections, and the Microsoft advertising platform, which third-party developers can use to make money from their applications.
On top of all of this reside the actual services for consumers and office workers. Some will come from Microsoft, but most will be created by the developers at whom this conference is aimed. And then there is the client computing platform, the PC and mobile software used to access the new Web services.
What makes Ozzie’s job particularly hard is that Microsoft has a stake in every level of this new Web-based computing “stack,” so it has to tell a convincing story about each piece. Failure to present a convincing case would be costly. Microsoft badly needs to win mind-share with developers when it comes to the next big computing transition. Failure would mean losing the initiative to IBM or Google.
