Ordinary Gweilo

Last week’s Economist had an article about Ray Ozzie, who is taking over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect for Microsoft.  Who he, you may be asking:

Mr Ozzie personally wrote a million of the first 3.5m lines of code for the first successful collaboration software, Lotus Notes. At a time when nobody had heard of the world wide web, Lotus Notes already offered “workspaces” not unlike today’s wikis. Mr Gates watched with his usual mixture of emotions towards innovations by others – envy and grudging admiration. These probably gave way to anxiety when IBM, Microsoft’s partner-turned-enemy, bought Lotus in 1995 for $3.5 billion.

Ah, Lotus Notes, my favourite piece of software in the whole world.

What made me stop and wonder, was this quote (my highlighting):

One reason why Mr Gates is so drawn to Mr Ozzie is that, as Mr Gates has said, “Ray is incredible at thinking of the end-user experience,” an area where Mr Gates, whose own genius is weighted towards business strategy rather than software finesse, has a less stellar reputation.

Lotus Notes may be very powerful and awfully clever, but the "end-user experience” is not one of its strengths.  So what is Bill Gates thinking?

The Guardian had another, more credible, theory:

Mr Ozzie’s influence is expected to push Microsoft further into highly developed web applications and knowledge sharing programs, areas where Microsoft is feeling the pressure from such companies as Google.

If Ray Ozzie could develop something with the power of Notes that was not so user-hostile then that might just work.  The other way around is just too horrible to contemplate