Ray Ozzie

Raymond "Ray" Ozzie (born November 20, 1955) is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010. Before Microsoft, he was best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes.

Ozzie grew up in Chicago, Illinois, later moving to Park Ridge, Illinois. He graduated from Maine South High School in 1973 where, in 1969, he learned to program on a GE-400 mainframe and an Olivetti-Underwood Programma 101.

In 1979, he received his bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he worked on the PLATO system.

Ozzie began his career at Data General Corporation, where he worked for Jonathan Sachs. After leaving Data General, he worked at Software Arts for Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the creators of VisiCalc, on that product and TK Solver.

He was then recruited by Sachs and Mitch Kapor to work for Lotus Development to develop what became Lotus Symphony. Ozzie left Lotus Development in 1984 and founded Iris Associates to create the product later sold by Lotus as Lotus Notes, based in part on his experiences using the PLATO Notes group messaging system. Iris Associates was acquired by Lotus in 1994, and Lotus itself was acquired by IBM in 1995.

Ozzie's early career and ideas about programming are described in the book Programmers at Work, a collection of interviews published by Microsoft Press.

Ozzie worked for Lotus and IBM for several years before leaving in 1997, to form Groove Networks. Groove was acquired by Microsoft in 2005, where Ozzie became one of three Chief Technical Officers. That year, he wrote a seven-page, 5,000-word internal memo, titled The Internet Services Disruption.

On June 15, 2006, Ozzie took over the role of Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates.

Ozzie was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004, for the conception and development of online collaboration products, including Lotus Notes.