Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie

I finally had some time today to read - with full attention - Ray Ozzie's Dawn of a New Day memo. I'm sure you've seen this floating around today, especially if you hang around the tech world of Lotus and Office. I actually had a few reactions that may be different from the rest of the blogisphere:

1. Its is increasingly clear the commoditization of devices (the PC-less future) is boiling down to the individual and will get harder for the enterprise (maybe not the small business) to navigate. Good news for Apple. The real Steve Jobs seems to get this, and the numbers seem to prove consumer markets are big money. See the blog posts I made on Friday about iPad apps traction and Apple deprecating Java (if you haven't already).
2. The birth of a new meme, "continuously connected." Ray's status as a tech visionary means that many of his words enter the tech lexicon once he's uttered them. I predict heavy use of these words or this term when talking enterprise tech.
3. Despite Ray's visionary status I doubt his equivalent of the "Space Race" rally cry will ripple outside of the tech cloud. (Pun intended). It will reach the edges for sure. Ray expects that too based on his edges commentary:

But the power and responsibility to truly effect transformation exists in no small part at the edge. Within those who, led or inspired, feel personally and collectively motivated to make; to act; to do.

In taking the time to read this, most likely it’s you.

But will it cross over into the public mind without a Time cover? Bill Gates can get that coverage but Ray is still relegated to the covers of tech media (despite the fact I think Ray has contributed more to IT than many IT folk who have graced cover of Time or Wired). Actually I think this idea is at the foundation of FSJ's reaction to the memo; techies can over-think things. I laughed out loud when I read the FSJ commentary...too bad he didn't read the whole post; I suspect that he really did for his day job.

BTW If you have only been reading about Ray's memo in the blogisphere, don't be a FSJ! Take time to read it all the way through. The blogisphere gets a bad rap for distilling information into bit-sized chunks for us, which can be handy, but please make your opinions after you've actually read it.

Overall I think it's compelling to read, and while I don't think the PC-less future is coming all that quickly, the idea that we can consider one does make interesting design decisions. Personally I like reading stuff like Ray's memo, but then again I'm in the club. ;-)

Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie