Today, Ray Ozzie published a memo he wrote to the staff at Microsoft, the company he has been with for five years and is now preparing to retire from. It’s bound to be a classic.

By now — even though the his Dawn of a New Day is only a few hours old — a great many people in the tech industry will already have read it. That in itself is a great testament, not only to Ozzie and the high regard in which he is held, but to the substantial truth of his message. Five years ago, even with ubiquitous email, RSS feeds, and online chat rooms everywhere, the wildfire spread of something like this — or the seemingly billions of other interesting and not-so-interesting essays and rants — just wouldn’t have been so fast. The now ubiquitous social web, in all its flavors, has changed all that. And to Ozzie’s point, this is just the beginning of the social-mobile thing. Huge, mind-boggling, revolutionary change will continue to come… it is inevitable.

This is great news for everyone except the most ardent Luddites, of course, but especially for those of us who get to participate in creating that change. It’s truly a wonder and a privilege. For those of us who have been around for a while — and yes, I do remember punch cards, compiling for hours overnight on timeshare computers as big as a car, email before domain names ( {ihnp4|decwrl|pyramid}!ptsfa!joh if you must know), and my first DOS and 5 1/4″ floppy disk powered PC at work — you can’t help but think back on your own personal experiences and how enormously and relentlessly technology has advanced and changed our everyday lives. But until the early 90’s or so, most of that was still confined to the workplace. Today, my youngest daughter, now in the 8th grade, can type faster than I could in college, creates multimedia science project presentations on her own computer, and buys and downloads music on her cloud-connected mobile device. Someday these will be her earliest memories of “stone age technology”. What amazing technological innovations will again, and again, completely and forever change the everyday world she knows?

And — back to the point of Ozzie’s call to action — how inspiring, exciting and fun it is to be directly involved in creating that world! A privilege, really. As a kid I dreamed of a Dick Tracy wristwatch… now I’m sure we’ll come up with something much cooler.

So, if you haven’t already, read Ray Ozzie’s memo. It’s written to Microsoft employees, but it’s really for all of us, and it’s a great read. Thanks, Ray.