Oh, the humility, the humility! Successor tells of tough job following Bill Gates

File this under “No shit, Sherlock”. Ray Ozzie, the man who is taking over Bill Gates' day-to-day role at Microsoft admitted that it was taking him a long time to build authority inside the company.

Ozzie, who assumed the title of chief software architect this summer, said that the deference shown to Mr Gates had both helped and hindered him.

"There's a certain mythology around any leader, particularly Bill, who's a really talented guy," said Ozzie. "He will always have an amazing level of soft power, and people want to follow him. The organization reveres him and wants to do what he wants."

"I've got to earn that followership and that takes some time." But Mr Ozzie said that his mission to reinvigorate the gigantic computer firm, which is being attacked by many competitors in different markets, was beginning to take hold.

Last year a leaked memo from Mr Ozzie pointed out many of the company's failings, and he underlined the need to embrace the next generation of online services to successfully take Microsoft into the future. The memo caused uproar inside the software giant, but Mr Ozzie said the dust was beginning to settle.

"I could see that some people really got it with respect to the shift that the industry is in right now, and some people were heads down working on whatever they had," he told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. "I really felt the need to get a broader message across."

He also talked of the reaction inside Microsoft to this summer's news that Bill Gates would step down in two years and hand over many strategic responsibilities.

"It more or less caused a bunch of people to go back and re-read the memo," he said. "I'm fortunate that Bill's given two years for this transition because people can see us together."

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1944649,00.html