Microsoft's Ray Ozzie says there's still a great future ahead for the PC


When he joined Microsoft, Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie got a chance to take a step back and look at the technology industry.

What he saw was that the PC wasn't the centre of the computing universe any more – but like Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang, he told the Future in Review conference this week that he doesn't think it's going away any time soon either - he also had words to say about the cloud, online privacy, HTML 5 and Apple.

"The world that I see panning out is one where individuals don't shift from 'I'm using exclusively this one thing called a PC as a Swiss army knife for everything I do' to using a different Swiss army knife. The beauty of what's going on in devices is you can imagine a device.

"Previously you could imagine software and build it but hardware was very hard and took a long time to build. Now you can imagine end-to-end device services.

"So there's probably a screen in the car that federates with the phone when you bring it into the car. Will we have a device with us that's always on? Yes. We call it a phone but it's a multi-purpose device.

"Will we also carry something of a larger form factor that we can quickly type on? For many of us, the answer is yes." And what will it look like? "The clamshell style of device is a very useful thing and I think it will be with us for ever. I think there is a role for the desktop too…"

Source -
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie on the privacy issues of cloud computing | News | TechRadar UK

Posted By: JMH
17 May 2010