Ray Ozzie

Former chief software architect at Microsoft; creator of Lotus Notes

• Born: November 20, 1955
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Primary Company/Organization: Microsoft

Introduction

Ray Ozzie developed the groundbreaking collaboration software Lotus Notes after developing the integrated suite Lotus Symphony. He joined Microsoft in the twenty-first century, first as its chief technical officer and then taking over the chief software architect position from Bill Gates. He left the company dissatisfied with its progress in cloud computing.

Early Life

Raymond Ozzie was born on November 20, 1955, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in the prosperous suburb of Park Ridge. He attended Park Ridge's Maine South High School, which is known for its extensive Applied Arts and Technology department, and began his computer programming education on a GE-400 time-sharing computer. In his senior year of high school, he worked as a systems programmer at Protection Mutual Insurance Company. He graduated in 1973 and enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in computer science. While at the University of Illinois, he worked on their Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations (PLATO) project as a systems programmer.

PLATO had been developed in an attempt to automate elements of the teaching experience, in order to deal with the explosive and steady growth of higher education enrollment since the end of World War II. It was a software platform, first developed in 1960, that ran on the LILIAC computer with a television set for displaying computer graphics, which were an integral part of the system. Multiple programs could be run at once, piped to different terminals. PLATO III, the system in use when Ozzie began college, accepted new lesson modules written in the TUTOR programming language designed for use especially with the system and with some hope that nonprogrammers could pick it up. PLATO IV, which included a terminal with a plasma display and vector line drawing capability, was introduced in 1972 while Ozzie was working on the project. It incorporated a revolutionary 16-by-16-inch infrared touch screen that students could use to answer questions and a standard keyboard substantially similar to today's desktop keyboards (although it lacked a numeric pad).

Although designed for educational purposes, PLATO project influenced both the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Apple, pioneering communications technology. It was an early home to multiplayer online games, which became popular enough that a program called the Enforcer was written in order to shut down or limit game play in order to free computing resources for their designed purpose. PLATO was the first exposure Ozzie—and many others—had to e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, and online collaboration. One of the first online message boards was introduced on PLATO as well: PLATO Notes, released in 1973, which inspired Ozzie's own Lotus Notes.

Life's Work

Ozzie graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in computer science and was hired by Data General to write an operating system for a local-area-network-based system using MicroNOVA workstations and file and print servers. Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms, founded in 1968 by former Digital employees. After Data General and a failed attempt to obtain funding for a workstation start-up, Ozzie took a job at Software Arts, the software company that had been founded to develop VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet program. More than any other product—hardware or software—VisiCalc was instrumental in popularizing microcomputers (personal computers) in business environments, where computers previously had been recreational; functions like word processing simply did not offer enough practical benefit to justify the cost.

In 1982, after reading Ted Nelson's work on the future of computers, Ozzie attempted to obtain funding to start a software company to develop the program that would become known as Lotus Notes. His experience using a prerelease IBM PC at Software Arts and the 3Com Ethernet card persuaded him that a revolution in personal computers and networking was in the immediate future. He failed to obtain funding, but he took a job at Lotus Development Corporation in 1983. Lotus was a software company in Westford, Massachusetts, known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program (packaged with a graphics package and database manager—hence the name), which was released that year. While VisiCalc ushered in the age of the spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3 is widely acknowledged as the superior product, and Lotus later sued various developers for infringing on its copyright in attempting to produce cheap clones of the software. Ozzie was hired to develop the follow-up software package, Lotus Symphony, an integrated suite for MS-DOS systems, including a word processor, spreadsheet, communications program, database management system, and charting program. Microsoft Works was a similar successor product; Symphony was one of the first to take advantage of assigning commands to all eighty-four of the keys on IBM's PC keyboard.

Software Arts had created VisiCalc, while another company, Personal Software, developed it. That arrangement inspired Ozzie, after proving himself to Lotus founder Mitch Kapor with the Symphony product, to propose the same. He formed Iris Associates, which developed his Lotus Notes idea. Iris was in charge of product development; Lotus Development would handle sales and marketing. Kapor agreed, and Iris Associates was founded at the end of 1984 in Littleton, Massachusetts. Ozzie hired Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell, with whom he had worked on the PLATO project.

Building on the online message board concept of PLATO Notes, Lotus Notes integrated collaboration functionality in one place, including—in eventual versions—voice and video conferencing, online meetings, blogging, file sharing, discussion forums, contacts management, calendaring, e-mail, and instant messaging, as well as collaborative document creation.

Iris was bought by Lotus Development in 1994 for $84 million, which in turn was acquired by IBM in 1995 for $3.5 billion, of which $3 billion of the purchase price was attributed to the value of Notes. Ozzie continued his Iris work until 1997, when he founded Groove Networks with his brother Jack, Ken Moore, and Eric Patey. Groove originated with Ozzie's belief that the collaboration requirements of decentralized business environments needed to be met with decentralized desktop software, not server-based architecture. Groove Networks was acquired by Microsoft in 2005, and the Groove software became Microsoft Office Groove, succeeded by Microsoft SharePoint Workspace, which was replaced in Office 2013 with Skydrive Pro and eventually OneDrive.

With the purchase of Groove by Microsoft, Ozzie became Microsoft's chief technical officer (CTO). In 2006, he succeeded Microsoft founder Bill Gates as Microsoft's chief software architect (CSA). Unexpectedly, he resigned from the position in 2010. While Ozzie, as both CTO and CSA, had been the driving force behind Microsoft's progress in cloud computing, he was unhappy with how slowly it was progressing. He considered cloud computing the future of computing—the “post-PC age.” Azure, the cloud computing operating system for which he oversaw the development, was not pursued enthusiastically at Microsoft and was reassigned to another team at the end of 2009 during a corporate reorganization.

Not long after leaving Microsoft, Ozzie founded the mobile communications start-up Talko Inc., which developed the Talko app; the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2015.

Ozzie founded a new company in 2018. Blues Wireless enables businesses to connect their physical products to the cloud via cellular. The company is a hyper-scaler focused on 5G cellular Internet of Things (IoT). As of 2024, Ozzie was the CEO of Blues Wireless and a director of Hewlett Packard.

Personal Life

Ozzie is married to Dawna Bousquet, and they have two children, Neil and Jill.

Bibliography

"Blues Wireless Raises $32 Million to Accelerate Enterprise Adoption of Cellular IoT." PR Newswire, 5 Jan. 2023, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blues-wireless-raises-32m-to-accelerate-enterprise-adoption-of-cellular-iot-301714865.html. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Eichenwald, Kurt. “Microsoft's Lost Decade.” Aug. 2012. Vanity Fair. Web. 14 Sept. 2012.

Jones, William. Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. Print.

Livingston, Jessica. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. New York: Apress, 2008. Print.

Rosenberg, Josty, and Arthur Mateos. The Cloud at Your Service. Greenwich, CT: Manning, 2010. Print.