Architect Ray Ozzie Bids Microsoft Goodbye

Microsoft announced through a letter from CEO Steve Ballmer that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is leaving the company. Ray is the successor of Bill Gates, he was the one who had put Microsoft in the clouds.

Here’s the email that Steve Ballmer sent Microsoft employees:

From: Steveb

Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010

To: Microsoft – All Employees

Subject: Ray Ozzie Transition

This past March marked a significant milestone for the company when, in a speech at the University of Washington, I sent a message to the world that we’re ‘all in’ when it comes to the cloud. In that speech I noted that Ray’s Internet Services Disruption memo nearly five years ago, and his work since, stimulated thinking across the company and helped catalyze our drive to the cloud.

As a company, we’ve accomplished much in the past five years as we look at the cloud and services. Windows Live now serves as a natural web-based services complement to both Windows and Office. SharePoint and Exchange have now decidedly embraced the cloud. And by conceiving, incubating and shepherding Windows Azure, Ray helped ensure we have a tremendously rich platform foundation that will enable app-level innovation across the company and by customers for years to come.

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