Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie is one of those figures I deeply admire from the sidelines. The Chicago-born engineer behind Lotus Notes, he later succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, which is about as heavy a torch as anyone in software can be handed. What impresses me most is timing: he was sketching out collaborative groupware decades before online co-working felt natural to anyone. So much of how we work together today traces back to seeds he planted. He never sought the spotlight the way founders do, and that's exactly why I think of him as a quiet giant who rewired how the world gets things done.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Ray Ozzie

Name (Japanese)

レイ・オジー

Reading

れい・おじー

Born

November 20, 1955 (age 70)

Origin

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Occupation

programmer / computer scientist / engineer / businessperson

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Goat

High school

Maine South High School

University

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Awards & achievements

• 2000 W. Wallace McDowell Award

• Official sitehttp://ozzie.net/about
• Xhttps://x.com/rozzie
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray%20Ozzie
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AC%E3%82%A4%E3%83%BB%E3%82%AA%E3%82%B8%E3%83%BC
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92637

Tags

• Illinois
• programmer
• computer scientist
• engineer

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.