A Conversation with Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie has been one of the most influential innovators in the world of software for three decades now. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979, he worked on important early applications like Visicalc and Lotus Symphony, before setting out on his own to form Isis Associates, where he created the product that eventually became Lotus Notes. Ozzie then founded Groove Networks, which developed powerful collaboration tools before the term “social software” had even been coined. After Groove was acquired by Microsoft, Ozzie eventually took over the role of chief software architect from Bill Gates, where he served until late 2010.
SJ: Let’s start with your own process. If you look back over your career, and think about ideas that you had on your own or in groups, do you see different patterns or processes in the way that you work, or the kind of environments that have been particularly fruitful?
RO: It feels as though it’s a very personal thing, in terms of the different people I would classify as innovators. For me, I’ve got to create white space in some way that maps to my lifestyle, and that has varied based on how old my kids were, what stage my businesses were in. Everybody has to find some way of introducing that space where you can get out of the day-to-day-to-day stuff that we all impose upon ourselves. For me, the consistent patterns are—and I know this is weird—we have a lake house and we have a place on the ocean, so getting out and boating by myself for a few hours, especially when the weather is rough, it helps. I don’t know why, but when I’m doing something that’s not putting my body into normal reactive patterns—I’m sure athletics would do the same thing—where I’m trying to deal with this wave, or something about the weather, it’s freeing up some other part of my mind, and I come up with a bunch of ideas. I have to have a stack of notes while I’m out there.
SJ: That sounds dangerous!
RO: It is dangerous. I’ll stop, I’ll write some stuff down . . . so that’s one kind of randomness. I don’t know how many people do it, but while sleeping, those background threads are still running. This happened last night: I wake up at 2:30 A.M., or 3 A.M., and something is rolling around, some problem that I solved or that won’t go away. And I have to find some notepad and write stuff down because during the day I’m just not solving it. The other thing is, and I guess this ties in with the boat in a little way, but I do well when I put myself into a disoriented or exhausted situation. International travel is one of best times for me to think differently. When I’m not so much time-zone confused, but when I’m in Asia in particular, and I can’t really get around as well, it helps get me out of that normal pattern. And again, that’s been a repeatable thing over the years.
SJ: It’s the power of disorientation.
RO: Exactly.
SJ: I have this thing where I’m constantly going somewhere to give a speech, for two days or three days, and I’m dropped in a city in Asia or Europe or somewhere like that. And I’ll be there for three days. And I’ll have one day to just get adjusted. Then I give my speech, and then I have my bonus day. And I have this routine of just walking out and roaming around for three hours more or less without a map. And then finding someplace to have dinner kind of on my own. And then I sit there at dinner by myself with my little notebook. And there’s some great ideation process that happens for me at those times—from the cultural disorientation as well as the time zone.
RO: I completely agree. For me, it’s similar to that. But I also am fascinated by mass transit. Tokyo is amazing for this. I like looking at people, I like staring at them and wondering what they’re doing with their lives. Looking at what they’re using to communicate or entertain themselves, and then go from place to place in the city that I might not have been.
I like the word disorientation because the whole thing I’m trying to escape is orientation. In fact, this is what I’m doing at this moment in my career right now. For thirteen years, from 1984 till 1997, I worked on this thing that came to be called Lotus Notes. But it started as nothing, at zero, I started a little start-up, and it went up, up, up, and then at 1997, I left IBM and returned to zero. It was just a complete separation. Because I saw this Internet thing going on and I wanted to be part of it. And I knew I couldn’t do it from the orientation that I was in. Nineteen ninety-seven happened to be thirteen years ago. I just returned to zero, and I am now disoriented, trying to find a good orientation to latch onto. It’s just the way I work.
SJ: How did the idea for Lotus Notes come about?
RO: The Lotus Notes story is one of those situations where I and several other people—the people who ended up being my cofounders—were exposed to a system that we couldn’t shake. It became an itch that we needed to scratch. And the thing that we ultimately built, both the ethos and the name itself, came from that thing that we were exposed to. The product we ultimately built was actually a lot different. But the original experience was the common thread between us.
This was in 1974 through 1977, and there was a group of us who were exposed to this Plato system at Urbana-Champaign in Illinois. This was on the early side of computer science; we were still using punch cards in our computer-science classes. But this Plato system was built by this creative eccentric, Don Bitzer, who believed that computers could change education. He didn’t know what couldn’t be done. He wanted to build graphics terminals with multimedia, audio. He invented the plasma panel, in order to have a graphics terminal. He built an audio device for it. That left an imprint in and of itself. I love being around people who just don’t believe things can’t be done, or don’t know that they can’t be done, and just build whatever the concept requires. But on the software side, we were all exposed to things that ultimately we’d get used to in the Internet. It was the emergence of online community. And there was probably a community of ten thousand people, five thousand at Urbana, Illinois, and another five thousand around the world. There were online chats, online discussions, interactive gaming, news. It was a full-fledged community. And there was this thing called Notes that did e-mail, personal notes, and discussions, group notes. And after we left, and went into the real world and got our jobs (they went to DEC, I went to Data General), that was the thread that we kept coming back to. We were like: these are interesting computers, but where are the people? And so basically we would get together weekend after weekend, month after month, year after year, and say: “We have to bring the people back into the equation.”
SJ: So what, that’s seven years that the memory of the system is in your head before you actually started to build it?
RO: Well, it went kind of like this: ’78 was when we left and came east from Illinois. Eighty-one was when I wrote the first business plan for it and tried to begin getting funding. Eightythree I realized I couldn’t get funding, so I did a deal with Mitch Kapor, and ’84 was when the deal with Mitch let me spin out and start working on it in earnest.
SJ: So six, seven years. It reminds me so much of something in my own life, although I didn’t do anything nearly as epic. I was in college from ’86 to ’90 and HyperCard came out in ’87. I’ve never really been a programmer, but I lost a whole semester trying to build this HyperCard application basically for keeping all my notes and research. (Which eventually fed into my interest in applications like DEVONthink and the commonplace-book tradition.) But the main thing I got out of HyperCard was that it really prepared me for the Web, by working in that hypertextual environment. So I dabbled with HyperCard and then I kind of put that experience away for seven or eight years—but then in ’94, when the Web started to break, I was just prepared for it. The first time I saw it, I was like: oh, I know exactly what this is going to be.
RO: That’s a reoccurring theme also. You are the sum in many ways of your experiences and you get these success patterns, failure patterns, sometimes those patterns help—like what you just described. But sometimes those patterns hurt, because they constrain your outlook. Something that might not have worked before might work now, because the environment has changed. But the innovators that I know that are successful keep testing those patterns over and over and over because people around them change and the technology environment changes. And so you might look at somebody and say: “You’re a one-trick pony. You keep building the same thing over and over.” But it’s a good thing! That means you’re taking those patterns and just recasting them continuously against changes in the environment. And if you believe passionately in a pattern, it’s great. Go for it!
I’m selfishly defending this viewpoint, because I am a one-trick pony. I believe in this social stuff and I’m out there right now trying to figure out how the mobile services world changes the way that we interact with one another. How has the embrace of this second life on the Internet changed the way that people will embrace interaction, where they might have rejected it before?
SJ: You used the phrase background process before. That strikes me as being really important. In my personal experience, the people I’ve been around that are good at innovating are able to just keep these background threads alive so that they can bring them to the foreground when they do become relevant. They’re focused on one thing, but there are like nine things in the background. You never know when one of those things is going to suddenly jump to the foreground.
RO: Exactly. And just to geek out on computer architecture for one moment, I used to actually think of them as background threads, like threads of execution, but that actually doesn’t scale, because you’re exposed to many, many things, and you’re not going to spin up a new thread every time you’ve got an idea—you’d run out of capacity. So what I think is going on, and there must be a physiological basis for this, I think it’s more synchronous; it’s more of a standing query. You have formulated a pattern, and you’re looking for this and this within a set of knowns in the pattern. You’ve got all of these standing queries in your brain. And so when you are exposed to new things, they are new events that are being generated that are mapped against all the standing queries. And then something fires.
SJ: That’s exactly what it is. I love that. So let’s think about this sort of thing in an organizational context. You’ve talked about the difference between “emergent” and “directed” innovation.
RO: Sure, it’s very simply that emergent is bottom up, like a coral reef that grows different things that mutate. It’s basically building up capabilities from the ground up. It’s a very inefficient process. It requires lots of failure for some success to pop up—but what pops up in an emergent basis generally takes shapes that people don’t expect. Which is really cool. It combines X, Y, and Z in a way that, if you’d actually been thinking about it, you probably wouldn’t have approached it because it wouldn’t have matched a pattern that you had already had in your mind. And so, within corporate environments, things that really do resemble more basic research, not applied research, not product development, do add some level in intentional serendipity. That is an asset that I did see that I respected within the Microsoft environment. And IBM. It’s hard to foster that, and I don’t know of a sustainable model, but it’s helpful. It’s clearly what’s happening in the start-up ecosystem right now. I mean you have base technology improvements that are happening, and you’ve got little tiny tests, that are happening with one, two, three, four people that get angel-funded or not. Anything that can be done, will be done. Interesting tests emerge, or opportunities, from that kind of environment.
When I say directed what I mean is this: You have either an existing, successful approach, or an existing high-value problem that you know you need to solve. You know generally how to solve it. Let’s say it’s: I have people who need to work together; I need people to work together who are far apart; I have people that need to work together that use documents. You start introducing a few constraints, or a few known models, and try to innovate around the edges, using those core constraints. Or it’s something like: We need to go to the moon. We can break that down into ten pieces, each of those submissions, and go ahead and innovate around that constraint. And you can get some amazing stuff. And both of them are tremendously important, but they’re both better when combined, I think. I think the directed approach accelerates fleshing out which of the emergent ones are useful, and can be brought forth very quickly. And without the emergent, you keep thinking about things the same way, over and over and over.
SJ: That’s one of the questions that I got that kind of surprised me when I was out promoting Good Ideas. In fact I still get it when I’m talking about it. Which is, people say, all this stuff is really helpful and interesting for generating ideas and stumbling across new things, but how do you tell when an idea is a good one. And I’m always a little stumped.
RO: I’m just so excited, so enamored with how things have evolved, because of the Internet and because of open source and because of services that now let us get out there with ideas, and test them in public with real people. Historically, a lot of our industries, especially any IP-based industry, grew up with heavy constraints on the distribution chain—broadcast television, print books, shrink-wrapped software, music on vinyl discs. The distribution mechanism defined a lot going all the way back to the creation of the work itself. And again, sometimes that helped because constraints having two sides of an LP with end songs, say—sometimes can actually help shape the medium. Or help shape the content. But it also introduced that massive constraint. So in software, the whole notion of product planning, and research, and all this stuff, was all based on the fact that you knew you could only get something out there once every two or three years, because of the nature of the distribution channels. So you’d better do the best job you can at incorporating what you know from the outside. That’s just so different now. It’s tremendous.
SJ: I agree, but one of the questions I’ve always had is how portable are these kinds of innovations and new models of collaboration outside the world of software?
RO: I actually believe that most IP-based product development falls into the same general category of software. If you’re building a drug compound, for instance, the same laws should apply. The basic innovation here tends to be that more complex things can be developed by more people who are not in the same place at the same time, which is really neat. For good, bad, and ugly, thanks to the Internet, we’re exposed to all these different ways that other people think, and we have lots of capacity to that can be brought together to solve problems—across all industries. So that’s a fundamentally transformative thing.
SJ: So it’s a great time to be back at zero and trying to get disoriented . . .
RO: Oh, it is. It sure is.