Microsoft software visionary, Ray Ozzie to quit

In a note circulated to Microsoft employees yesterday, Steven A Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, disclosed that Ozzie would relinquish his role as chief software architect of the company. He would however, spend some time handing his work over to other people before making his exit from the company altogether, he added.

Ozzie most recently spearheaded Microsoft's move into cloud computing, including setting out the plan for the Azure service that enables corporates to run business software in Microsoft's data centers.

''Since being at Microsoft, both through inspiration and impact he's been instrumental in our transition toward a software world now centered on services,'' Ballmer wrote about Ozzie, 54.

Hailed as one of the world's great programmers, Ozzie, before his assignment at Microsoft, steered the creation of Lotus Notes, a popular e-mail and collaborative workspace software package. Later with the dot-com boom, he started Groove Networks, another collaboration software maker,  that swapped data using more modern techniques.

In 2005, Microsoft acquired both Groove and Ozzie, because the company wanted him to drive its  move into building online business software services.

That year, Ozzie, in a seven-page, 5,000-word memo wrote that the Internet Services Disruption was meant to inspire the company to move quickly with the emergence of a host of rivals.