Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie: chant of change at Microsoft

Mr Ozzie has pursued that passion through generations of technology, adapting his thinking and anticipating the next trends in technology architecture before they have been recognised elsewhere.

His first taste of the power of computers to foster collaboration came with Plato, a mainframe computer system at the University of Illinois. The system was designed to handle early forms of messaging and group chat rooms, forerunners of the collaboration tools that are now central to Microsoft's work.

Everybody hopes that Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie: chant of change at Microsoft By setting limited but clear objectives for each project and by emphasising frequent re-releases of software, Mr Ozzie's style is in some ways more in keeping with the times than that of Mr Gates.

Google has set the tone, issuing rapid new releases of its server-based software to bring out new services and frequent improvements of existing products.