Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect departs from Microsoft

The departure of Ray Ozzie was long anticipated. The timing is curious enough for me though...He is a software engineer of great talent and foresight. Before joining Microsoft, Ray has two notable products to his credit. One, Lotus Notes which was purchased by IBM somewhere around 1995. It has a lot of following even now yet its true potential was never realized. Second was Groove, which was purchased by Microsoft along with Ray himself. Groove was later assimilated in MS Sharepoint technology which was released to users of later versions of MS Office (such as office 2007). Ray has been with microsoft since 2005.

Are they gonna miss you?

Yet, interesting for me is the way, Ozzie is being hotly debated in the technology circles. He has a fair share of devotees and hostiles amongs the community so it is not uncommon to see swords being drawn in favor or against him. For me his departure from microsoft presents two gloomy scenarios for future:
1. Ray Ozzie has been a great proponent of cloud computing and has been predicting the ultimate rise of cloud computing for a very long time. In fact Sharepoint always had a strong group of people in Microsoft devoted fanatically to the idea of cloud computing. As a consequence, Microsoft under his vision has delivered a fairly impressive portfolio of cloud-based offerings. On the consumer side, Microsoft now has a full range of Windows Live services, and it’s done an impressive job of moving Exchange and SharePoint to hosted services that aren’t just for enterprises anymore. Yet, all these achievements cant gloss over the stark failure that Ray had due to his lack of vision. And today, with his departure, the future of cloud based applications from Microsoft is also in doubt.
2. The knowledge of software architecture and its relevance has also been thrown into question. With the emergent phenomenon of end user programming and cloud, the question has been present there for a very long time whether, organizations need actual software architects anymore? Today more and more services are lacking any integral underlying architecture and instead are becoming more and more capable of evolving themselves according to user's demands.With the departure of Ray from Microsoft and no replacement being announced in his seat, it seems like Microsoft has answered in affirmative regarding software architecture becoming gradually obsolete. A sad tale of affairs indeed.