Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie

Excellent memo from one of the world’s most impressive technology visionaries: Ray Ozzie’s swan song as he prepares to leave Microsoft.  As an employee and a shareholder I’m sad to lose him, and in many ways I find it discouraging and embarrassing that we weren’t able to better execute on the vision he articulated during his time with the company.  The tech world will most likely continue to evolve as he describes.  I only hope I’m someplace where I’m able to help actually make it happen.

Two interesting “media delivery” related developments this week coming out of the sleepy little town of Palo Alto:

During their latest earnings report, Netflix (NFLX) announced they now serve most of their content via streaming, vs. DVD mailers.  More and more people are adopting the “watch instantly” approach, via Netflix applications that run on their computers, their game consoles, or even on the TV itself.  The last 2 years have seen a huge shift away from DVD and Blu-Ray.  Streaming used to be for the minority of Netflix subscribers, now it’s the majority.

Just down the road at Apple (AAPL), Steve Jobs unveiled the latest and greatest in the Mac lineup, the revamped MacBook Air.  The original Air didn’t have an internal optical drive, but instead made it an optional external peripheral.  You still needed it if you wanted to reinstall the operating system, etc. but for the most part you didn’t HAVE to have the accessory and could live optical-drive-free.  But now, instead of a recovery CD / DVD (like most computers ship with) the Air comes with a recovery USB drive instead.  Brilliant.  Now you don’t really need an optical drive at all.

The tipping point has been reached, and early adopters are hastening the changeover.  How long before we start seeing large-scale abandonment of plastic discs as the way we buy movies and software?

My wife got a great photo this morning of our daughter Cadence (on the right) enjoying some play time with her friend Hannah.  Who’s she?

• the 5 year old daughter of my wife’s best friend (Happy 5th Birthday Hannah!)
• one of the strongest personalities I’ve ever encountered
• a cancer survivor who is currently battling leukemia

Hanna’s been a part of our extended family for awhile now.  I started thinking of her as a little glimpse into my future once I learned that we’d be having a baby girl of our own.  And I always assumed that she and Cadence would grow up together, scheming and doing their best to terrorize us.  When we learned recently that Hannah had cancer, it really rattled our little world.  It really puts things into perspective when you see hard times befall someone innocent who did absolutely nothing to bring it upon themselves.  Hannah and her family have been forced to step up to face a terrible situation I’ve personally never had any concept of dealing with, and it’s been both heartbreaking and inspirational for my wife and I to follow along with them, helping out as best we can.

If you’re interested in Hannah’s ongoing battle against cancer, her mom Carrie keeps a running update here:

http://hannahgrage.blogspot.com/

And if you’re interested in donating to support their efforts, they’d really appreciate it:

http://hannahgrage.bbnow.org/

Meanwhile, Cadence will keep Hannah smiling, while I do my part on my bike:

Hannah gets top billing / sponsor decal placement!