Ray Ozzie is an impressive guy. He was hand-picked by Bill Gates to lead Microsoft’s technology direction and was the creator of Lotus Notes. Ray was interviewed in Wired Magazine a little while ago and told a very interesting story.
When he was in college in the late 1970’s, Ray was working part-time writing software with a professor from his school. The professor lived on the other side of town so Ozzie worked with him remotely. The professor was a great person to work with and a brilliant coder, but one of the slowest typists Ray had ever seen. Email was fine, but chatting with him on the terminal talk program was almost unbearable.
Toward the end of the project the professor held a party at his home and invited Ray. Ozzie got a big surprise when he saw the professor for the first time. “The professor was a quadriplegic and had been entering text by holding a stick in his teeth and poking it at the keyboard. Ozzie was floored.”
This experience started Ray thinking about how computers can connect people and lead him to begin working on Lotus Notes. Computers have a great ability to level the playing field and let people show what they can do regardless of physical handicaps.
Ray Ozzie worked with this professor over 30 years ago using telephones, email, and terminal based chat programs. We have so many more tools today than Ray and his professor had, but the fundamentals are the same.
Working remotely makes the pool of talent you can hire from much larger. You get access to people who are in different locations, but also access to great thinkers who can’t come into the office for whatever reason. It is all about finding talent anywhere you can.