Former Microsoft Chief Architect Ray Ozzie Starts New Company

By Douglas Perry
published

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect and successor of Bill Gates in that role, is telling media that he is founding a new company.

So far, we only know that the company is called Cocomo. There is no office yet, but just the note that he is hiring and that he won't be able to talk about the business "for some months". Ozzie indicated that the team includes people he worked with before. Boston.com reported that former Microsoft executives Matt Pope is a co-founder of Cocomo, and Ransom Richardson, another former Microsoft executive, joined the company as well.

There is a first public job posting that seeks a lead UX designer, for both smartphone and tablet iOS and Android platforms. The candidate the company would consider will have "had a minimum of several years of experience designing, building and delivering mobile apps on platforms such as iPhone, iPad, and Android." There are several notes that the individual will have to "understand and embrace the conceptual models, constraints and affordances of the mobile/social design environment", which would include "Email & SMS, Facebook, Google+, Twitter".

Ozzie left Microsoft in October 2010 and hinted that he may be looking at some opportunities to realize a "post-PC world". Ozzie, recently updated his blog earlier this week with some tweaks, but no new posts. In six years, Ozzie only posted to his blog twice - when he announced his resignation from Microsoft in 2010 and when his previous company, Groove, was acquired by Microsoft in 2005.

Douglas Perry
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • tomate2
    hopefully not another patent troll company...
    Reply
  • memadmax
    "had a minimum of several years of experience designing, building and delivering mobile apps on platforms such as iPhone, iPad, and Android."

    ROFL.........
    Reply
  • joytech22
    had a minimum of several years of experience

    That's one way of saying how much work experience you have.. LOL
    Reply
  • lamorpa
    This certainly shows his completely-out-of-touch hubris. Does he think all the employees he ripped off when he sold out and walked away from Groove Networks don't remember? I interviewed a number of them. After many, many years of 80 hour weeks, they got less than pennies on the dollar for stock options, while he took a sweet deal from MS. Even if Groove wasn't big, does a little product called Lotus 123, which he rode into the ground, not come to mind?
    Reply
  • sunflier
    Beach Boys, "There's a place called Kokomo" comes to mind.
    Reply
  • teddymines
    I still haven't forgiven him for that digital abortion named Lotus Notes.
    Reply
  • freggo
    memadmax"had a minimum of several years of experience designing, building and delivering mobile apps on platforms such as iPhone, iPad, and Android."ROFL.........
    My thought exactly. The iPad is just about 2 years old, Android about 3 years (depending on how you count).

    Reply
  • FAIR WARNING TO ANYONE STUPID ENOUGH TO CONSIDER WORKING FOR RAY OZZIE: IN THE END, HE WILL SCREW YOU.

    Former Groove employee here. After years of working on and helping to QA ("Groovefests," or mandatory unpaid overtime) a product I truly believed in -- Groove -- Ray Ozzie downsized the company in order to prep it for sale to Microsoft, and then proceeded to zero out all the common options of Groove stock so that peon employees like me ended up with $0.00 for all our years of hard work on a product that was novel in its time. Ray and his board of directors, of course, made out like bandits, with multi-million dollar payouts and high-level jobs at Microsoft. Groove employees who actually purchased their options with cold, hard cash paid thousands of dollars for what amounted in the end to literally nothing. Nothing.



    Reply
  • alidan
    freggoMy thought exactly. The iPad is just about 2 years old, Android about 3 years (depending on how you count).
    i phone, and previous to that were palm pilots. if im not mistaken you could have close to 15 years of mobile app experience at this point, if thats all you did.
    Reply
  • lathe26
    I saw him speak at an annual Microsoft Company Meeting. Of all the speakers I heard over 10 years, he was by far the absolute worst.

    His hour long speech had absolutely no point, no direction, no content. He just reminisced about what happened in the computer industry. He meandered in front of +20K employees. He tossed out odd random phrases like "cookie licker" that made audience murmur "what is he talking about".

    His attempt to instill early confidence in a post-Bill Microsoft was a failure. I actually lost some faith in the leadership that day. Worse, that hour is the only time at any Microsoft Company Meeting that I wanted the time back and an apology.
    Reply