Back in March after our MIX08 event I wrote a post about Ray Ozzie titled “The Ray Ozzie files” and decided it was time for another instalment. Regular readers of my blog will know I’m a big fan of Ray as a technical visionary and someone who brings some overdue change to Microsoft – notably an outside in approach to things. He also delivered one of the most beautiful presentations I have ever seen at Microsoft this summer at our MGX (internal sales) event. Simply stunning in the power of his delivery and the rallying call he gave to the troops.

In this episode of the Ozzie files I’ve used a favourite new tool of mine called Wordle to analyze Ray’s speeches over the last few years. Basically I took a number of his public speeches and ran them through Wordle, removing stop words and limiting to 1000 total words. This gives us a view of the consistency of messaging and key themes. Here goes

 

gartner2004

Gartner interview (pre Microsoft) 2004

servicesdisruption

Internet Services Disruption Memo 2005

fam06

Financial Analysts Meeting 2006

fam07

Financial Analysts Meeting 2007

fam08

Financial Analysts Meeting 2008

servicesstrategyupdate 

Services Strategy Update 2008

 

So what can we learn from this? I think we can pretty much say services is where Ray spends a lot of his time but it’s also blended over time as the Software plus Services vision has evolved I think. Another observation is that Ray is very persistent. There is little deviation from the chosen path and a high degree of consistency – as seen in the same or similar words appearing each time.

Anyway – just a bit of fun and will be interesting to apply this to Ray’s keynote at the PDC in October.