Loyalty with a price tag
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Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, adored by exuberant fans and admired for his independence has become CTO of Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie, the man who created the IBM Lotus Notes groupware package, is one of those charismatic software industry stars who has real fans - the type who whoop when he walks on the stage. Only back in January, he got just that reception when he spoke at the huge IBM LotusSphere conference in Florida, trumping the applause given to the other guest speaker, John Cleese.
Part of Ozzie's popularity - rather like Steve Jobs at Apple - is due to his independence, and his willingness to take on the industry giants, most notably Microsoft.
Now what must those fans be feeling? In March, the company that Ozzie founded after leaving Lotus, peer-to-peer collaboration software specialist Groove Networks, was sold to Microsoft. Ozzie will now take a bigger and distinctly more corporate job: CTO for Microsoft. He will report to the one man who has the desire and the capability to squish Lotus Notes out of existence: Bill Gates.
But will he stick around? When IBM took over Lotus in the early 1990s, Ozzie defiantly fought the take over...before caving in days after he was promised both a vast sum of money and independence. After a polite interval, he left to form Groove. But then, IBM never made Ozzie its CTO.
