Ozzie at the Bat

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie faced down two hardball questions in a Q & A wrap to a conversation with Wired editor Steven Levy at the Churchill Club. On one, a much anticipated question about Google’s new realtime collaboration tool Wave, Ozzie had put a lot of thought into the reply. He praised the small startup project as only he could, as a clone of the Groove software he sold to Microsoft while joining the company and taking the CSA reins from Bill Gates.

But he additionally critiqued the Google effort as “anti-Web”,

suggesting the project took on such a hard problem that its complexity might curb its adoption. Nonetheless, he seemed to relish learning from Google’s effort, positioning Live Mesh as a simpler reworking of Groove in the context of integration into the Microsoft OS. For a Silicon Valley audience who probably has paid little notice to Mesh, Ozzie’s careful dissection may spark some deeper attention as Wave exits its early pilot stages and grapples with integration into Google Apps.