Microsoft's Ray Ozzie makes his ascent to the throne at TechEd's opening keynote address last 11 June

The first rule of public speaking, I learned long ago, is to know your audience. When Ray Ozzie took the stage for TechEd's opening keynote speech, standing in the spot normally reserved for Bill Gates, he probably knew he was on his way to ascending a throne, perhaps within the next four days. Almost eight minutes of Ozzie's speech were devoted to the story of his rise to power - his days with Bricklin and Frankston with VisiCalc, his development of Lotus Notes, his creation of Groove services. It was a big buildup, and we could all see it was leading to something. Perhaps an earlier draft of his speech may have mentioned he was capturing the coveted Chief Software Architect seat that Gates was vacating, but that may have been edited out for fear it would be perceived by analysts as a palace coup.

So instead, Ozzie's message to his audience was left as something of a cliffhanger, though without much of a cliff. The world, he said, is due for an "era of services disruption," the likes of which could not be equaled by the advent of the Internet.

"In many ways change and disruption are synonymous with our industry," Ozzie said, "and this is really no accident. It's because the fundamental, low-level, enabling technologies that we build our stuff on continue improvement with a steady march of progress, building and building, and every five to ten years something just snaps. A wave forms, and it crests, and a fundamental transformation of one kind or another occurs."

The specific source of the wave to which Ozzie referred was never mentioned, at least during the speech, though Microsoft presenters made allusions to it throughout the week. But the thousands of bewildered attendees - I know they were bewildered because I listened to them as they exited the keynote - spent at least some, perhaps most, of their time that week struggling to figure out what they were all alluding to. Thursday afternoon came, and it made a little more sense. It's the era of Ozzie's promotion - that's the disruption, there's the rub. Sorry to have been so confused there, Ray, but we're cleared up now.

Perhaps the heads of companies spend too little time interacting with their customers or their audiences or the people seated about them in restaurants. If you spend time there, you actually learn something about these executives, if only second-hand: They transpose their ideas upon their employees, their own history becomes the chronicle of world events, the milestones of their lives become the raison d'être for human existence. Their mid-life crises become the Dark Ages of Civilization. Their promotions become the Era of Services Disruption.

For some companies, depending upon the relative charisma of their leaders, this transposition can be particularly effective. If Steve Jobs were to retire tomorrow, time would stand still for millions. Jobs gives hope to executives everywhere that not only can one man make a difference, but that within their own lifetimes - the only noteworthy events outside of which are the Big Bang and the End of Time - they themselves can justify the wiping out of the dinosaurs.

But for the rest of the world, for whom lunchtime rushes by too quickly and the Big Bang was the first in a series of services disruptions, it's way too difficult to conjure the time or energy to want to be interested, much less enthusiastic, by all of this. They don't want another disruption, thank you very much. They just want the world to make sense again. They would appreciate being able to reclaim those lost moments with their families, to witness more of the intervals between childhood and adolescence, before they leave home to take on jobs as IT specialists. They would appreciate it if their CEO or CxO or C-something-O would get a life.

"If there's a lesson to be learned," said Ozzie toward the close, "it's that those who survive and thrive are the ones who understand the trends, and make intentional decisions about their own destiny at the right time."

If Ray Ozzie knew his audience, if he had truly come to TechEd "people ready," he would have known the Internet wasn't something that just occurred like a spark or a sneeze to the 11,000 or so people out there in the audience who devote every ounce of their energy, and even a chunk of their souls. For these people, the Internet, the computer, the electron are not phenomena, any more than the Panama Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad just happened to the people who lived - and died - constructing them. These people are information technology, not the consumers of it. They are the mainstream, the source of Ozzie's wave. For them, progress is way too slow a thing. Ozzie's own destiny is more the product of their intentional decisions than he may realize.

One of the few technologies Ozzie referred to by name, Windows Live Identity Service, fails to disrupt the crowd.