Microsoft's Ozzie maps out the post PC world

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Outgoing Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie believes hosted services and always-on appliances, not the PC, are the future of IT.

In a blog post Ozzie, who is due to retire from Microsoft, set out where he thinks the company should be going – and where he thinks business technology is heading.

“Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and mainframe, the key facets of simplicity and broad approachability were key to its amazing success,” he wrote.

“If there’s to be a next wave of industry reconfiguration – toward a world of internet-connected continuous services and appliance-like connected devices – it would likely arise again from those very same facets.”

Ozzie believes this will not happen for some time, but it is inevitable if current trends continue.

During his time at Microsoft, Ozzie was a major force in pushing the company in the direction of the cloud, launching the Azure platform as a service (PaaS) offering and online applications that have now started to become so important to Microsoft.

In his blog, Ozzie suggested that with cloud, smartphones and tablets, we are only now seeing the tip of an iceberg, and that there will be much more technology change to follow. These include wearable technologies and wall-mounted devices that might seem far-fetched today, but which will be taken for granted in the future.

“And all these new services will work hand-in-hand with an unimaginably fascinating world of devices-to-come. Today’s PCs, phones and pads are just the very beginning; we’ll see decades to come of incredible innovation from which will emerge all sorts of ‘connected companions’ that we’ll wear, we’ll carry, we’ll use on our desks & walls and the environment all around us,” he said.

Ozzie also noted that November 20 will see the 25th anniversary of Windows. At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, was asked what the company’s riskiest bet will be. “The next release of Windows,” he replied.

Reportedly a Dutch Microsoft employee posted that Windows 8 will appear in two years time. If true, maybe the company is rushing for last calls on the ubiquitous operating system.

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