Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, in an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, delved into a series of subjects, most prominently open source and interoperability, software modeling, and the Windows Azure cloud operating system.Ray Ozzie,
Microsoft’s
chief software architect, took time out of a very
busy schedule to chat with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft at the
Microsoft
Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Ozzie, who sets the
tone for Microsoft’s overall software strategy, finally got
the opportunity to unveil part of his grand design for the future of
Microsoft,
in the form of Windows Azure–Microsoft’s cloud operating system.
Ozzie spoke
with eWEEK about Azure, but also about a variety of subjects, including open
source, interoperability, software modeling and domain-specific languages. In
making his mark with Azure, Ozzie also signals to the world that he is in
charge.
How much of Microsoft’s increased interest in interoperability
and support for open source comes from you?
It's hard to personalize
it like that. Like in any big organization, the way you do any kind of
change management is my simple rule of thumb: You say something, you do a
symbolic public hanging of something, and then you have to find somebody at the
edge who's actually going to be the change agent who drives things
through. You just can't make change happen when you're at that level, that
many levels of abstraction removed from where the work actually gets done.
So, have I been a proponent? Absolutely. Absolutely. And
not in interoperability for interoperability's sake—interoperability because
that's what customers do, that's what customers want, that's what customers
need.
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