Knowledge@Wharton's interview with Ray Ozzie, the Man Who Would Change Microsoft

Knowledge@Wharton posted an interview with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's new Chief Software Architect.

At Microsoft, Ozzie has led the company's "Live" initiative, focused on supplementing Microsoft's traditional desktop applications with web-based software and services. But his mission is much broader: to make sure the company's various product groups coordinate their efforts to take advantage of what he termed -- in a now famous memo sent to Microsoft's executive staff on October 28, 2005 -- the "Internet services disruption."

Accomplishing this feat won't be easy, in part because Microsoft is facing challenges on multiple fronts -- technical, business and cultural. New cross-platform technologies threaten to establish a new layer of abstraction that could reduce the importance of the operating system as a software development platform. Emerging business models -- such as open-source software and "free" advertising-supported applications -- threaten to undermine the economic basis for Microsoft's longstanding success. And while Microsoft's size provides it with enormous resources, some wonder whether this may make it difficult for the company to remain agile enough to break from its past successes and address these new challenges.

Click here to read or listen to the interview.