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Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks
namalc writes "In a huge shot across the groupware bow, Microsoft announced today that it would acquire Groove Networks, and Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove, would become Microsoft CTO.
Ray Ozzie, the
creator of Lotus Notes, had positioned Groove to straddle both the IBM/Lotus and Microsoft worlds. It will be interesting to see what direction Groove takes now."
But since Exchange only recently exceeded Notes, wouldn't it be fair to say that Ray Ozzie can bring his expertise to the table and make Exchange that much better? I think that's one of the improvements we'll see.
How is it that MS keeps AQUIRING ANYTHING? :P
Could someone PLEASE tell me WTF is going on in Washington?
This is getting nuts. LET THE MONOPOLISTS KEEP MONOPOLIZING MARKETS. It's all good.
Virtually all functions of LotusNotes are better served by other technologies, like the classic Apache/PHP/SQL combos etc. (Keep in mind that LotusNotes evolved in parallel with the WWW but most corporations were completely unaware of HTTP until Microsoft "discovered" it)
It is quite amusing to me that someone would proudly take credit for the creation of that monster. I think it goes to show tha there is no such thing as bad publicity for self-promoting "geniuses" ....
...or it's simply an indication of what it takes to buy this guy out...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Groove always seemed to be one of those really, really cool solutions, if only it weren't so tied to MS Office, Outlook, and Windows. Obviously that won't get any better now that MS owns Groove.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
You must be kidding...the only thing I hate worse than Outlook is Notes!
What a kludgy piece of crap.
Groove is an excellent (as of a demo I saw a couple of years ago) integration of pretty much all your collaboration tools. /. and MS Office, throw in IM, and server storage, and make it work well on crap hardware.
Think
It's the kind of turn-key integration that will take quite a while longer to realize using FOSS.
Truly, the pieces are all there, but getting them all to work as smoothly is non-trivial.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
While most of you probably don't care much about the products Groove Networks have in their suite, the real story here in Microsoft acquiring a new CTO. This man has an impressive track record in the technology field. He is responsible for the creation of Lotus Notes, a technology that Microsoft Exchange is just starting to catch up to both in features and install base. 100 Million people use his technology worldwide. He is also rated among the top five developers of the century.
This article has more to do with Microsoft continuing to build an impressive array of innovators and visionaries to carry the company for another 20 years. If they happen to integrate a few of his company's technologies into the current Office suite, that's just a bonus.
You neglected to mention that Notes has the dubious priviledge of being hated by both users and admins, while Exchange even though being pain for admins, is generally well received by corporate users. Notes was an unwieldy, diseased, monster. Most sane corporations have long replaced it with HTTP based systems combined with IMAP servers or Exchange.
I have never seen a Notes virus, it wouldn't be impossible but the execution control list would stop it doing anything, no idea what you are on about with message filtering and searching. My mail file is about 2GB and full text searches over the whole thing are sub-second. Outlook doesn't have built in full text search, and yes it does do automatic virus loading.
MS gets a nice peer-to-peer product, a "next generation Lotus Notes" that dovetails well with MS Office and MS Communicator (well, there's probably some overlap with the latter but that can be ironed out). More importantly, they get Ray Ozzie as CTO. People have noticed that Microsoft's technical direction seems to have been foundering a bit lately - Ozzie has both outstanding architectural skills and an excellent intuitive grasp of how people and teams use technology. It'll be interesting to see how Gates manages to share his C-level technical responsibilities with Ozzie.
I've spent the last ten minutes reading their website. Have you? It's 100% Content Free. It's a lovely marketing brochure though. They offer "Solutions"..ohh!
"Work together securely over the Internet as if you and your team are in the same physical location. Groove Virtual Office is everything your team needs to share information, manage projects, conduct meetings and get work done."
Sounds good. How does it do this? Lets try their FAQ:
"Q:What exactly is a virtual office? Why the product name change?
A: The nature of work today has changed. Work still happens in teams, but those teams are no longer tethered to a single office. Teams and the way they work have become virtual.
* They don't work at the same location.
* They don't work in the same time zone.
* They don't all work for the same company.
* They don't all connect to the same systems, and sometimes they aren't even connected to a network at all.
Groove was designed from its inception to support this type of work. For this reason, we've renamed Groove Workspace to Groove Virtual Office, described as software that allows teams of people to work together securely over the Internet as if they were in the same physical location."
Well that's nice. What the hell does it actually do though?
No it won't. We all know what direction Groove will take now.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
Well they are apparently going to incorperate it into Office and other products. Obviously once this is done the exising product will no longer have any use. Given Microsofts history obviously any non MS products won't work.. Though I don't know what apps the current application supports now anyways, guess I should give it a try.
1) create product that creates compatablity between 'deep pocketed' competitors products
2) wait for one or the other to purchase your company to control said compatablity functionality
Simple, yet genius. Although, once again, I am probably wrong.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who worked there or anyone they tried to recruit. (Hi there!) The Beverly, MA company was a 100% Microsoft house from the beginning with no provisions for Linux, UNIX or anything else. Why eschew crossplatform? Why use only MS for development? Why care so much about being single-platform when companies don't care about what runs back-office software? The answer is in today's headlines.
When we bought Lotus and by default Ray Ozzie and the Notes creators we inherited a tiny development culture that was utterly impenetrable. As much as Lotus kept us at arms length and did everything their own way, the Notes dudes wouldn't even let us on site. Hell they wouldn't let Lotus on site either. They just stayed locked up in Ray Ozzie's barn, crunching code. A big part of Notes failure to grow and develop and frankly, thrive, the way we wanted was the technical brilliance and organizational paralysis that the Ozzie-ites created. Eventually we found it easier to bypass them and this is why Notes 6 came out 2 years after Notes 5 which was 4 years late and is why Notes 7 is more than a year late and there are serious discussions over whether Notes itself won't be submerged into Workplace.
This article from Lotus Advisor goes into some depth of the core architecture of Notes and Domino. This is the really really cool stuff that Ray came up with. This is why Notes is used by 118 million people and loved with Mac like passion. I was at Lotusphere in Florida earlier this year with about 7000 other people, all passionate about Notes. The Notes UI comes in for some stick occasaionally. Normally by people critisising version 4.1 or something when the rest of the 118 million users left that behind years ago. The UI is not what it is all about people! Be a geek, see past the wallpaper and look at the house. Recent versions like 6.5 have built in instant messaging integration so names in all applications come alive when people are on line, this is real contextual collaboration. Version 7, a beta of which I am using allows the NSF store to be held on a DB2 relational database. It remains an object based store at the high level but with access views for close integration with relational applications. This makes Domino a really great geeks playground, and even better, you can get paid fairly well to play.
Companies nowadays - and microsoft pretty much from day one - seem to show a nasty habit of buying out another company, big or small that poses a threat, acquires their resources, mashes some elements of the acquired technologies into their own and discard the rest.
Groove, if any elements of it remains, is pretty much done in for, like microsoft swooping in like a cloud of locusts, consuming everything and moving on.
With all the resources at microsoft's disposal, why is it easier to buy out other technologies than to design their own? Is their R&D dept that dysfunctional they can't do anything themselves?
The acquire trend is not unique. I worked for a local high tech firm that bought out another, including most of their employees, and now practically everyone who was there when I was hired is long gone, fired, laid off or quit and the products designed by the original dev teams are scrapped and to a greater extent the acquired tech is no longer recognizable. I quit 5 years ago because we were ourselves bought out by another and for all my hard work, I was given a token job as their sole QA person rather than remain as a software developer switching from unix to windows. The irony is that now, the very product they develop runs on linux. If they'd just kept me on, even in a junior developer role for the windows environment, I might have been a really good asset to them when they went to linux.
That was a severe blow, I suppose for both myself and for them.
Technologies bought out is quickly obsoleted and the human resources are finicky and tempermental and will also surely become unrecognizable years later.
Now when I see takeovers, hostile or otherwise, I see it as the purchaser unable or unwilling to come up with their own technology and essentially commiting a psychotic act (large companies exhibit the same psychotic traits as individuals). In 5 years, what will be the shape of that technology, if it even exists in any usable form? That's what I'd like to know.
It is one of the very few corporate "solutions" that got that whole security thing down right from the start: it has been designed and developed to provide end-to-end security and it shows (in a good way).
Likewise, I pity the people stuck dealing with Exchange for anything bigger than a "moderately small" setup. Even the latest Exchange stuff is light years behind Domino/Notes.
And if you don't want to use the Notes client for your mail stuff, you can use Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook wich lets you use your favourite MS client (albeit losing some of that aforementioned security on the way).
Disclaimer: I manage/develop (among other things) Notes for a living.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Sure, as a former Chief Architect at Lotus and IBM, I may be biased . . . but I actually knew how to use Notes. Every time someone complained about Notes, it was not Notes they were complaining about. They were complaining about some crappy Notes DB that was so poorly designed that it worked horribly. Put a bug tracking system in Notes; good for under several hundred bugs. Anything more, and you can't do it easily. As for Apache/PHP/SQL, sure, you could reproduce what you could do in Notes, to a point. But, it would cost you A LOT MORE, and you would never get off-line capabilities. Something those of us on plane trips always appreciated. So, don't complain about the technology when you should be complaining about the implementation. Notes was good for certain things. RDBMSs are good at other things. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. But don't confuse the two. Notes is not a transaction system, and despite the hype, BLOB support still sucks under RDBMSs.
...tizzyd
That's a good point. It's odd that Notes has the Worst Client Ever (seriously, I've written better on my Commodore 64), and yet possibly the best mail server ever, at least outside of mainframe space. How the heck did these ever become one product?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hi a point made by flashdot lower down - would be best if people who really knew groove spoke of it. since i have used it from day 1, more than 5 yrs ago and developed many tools for it (www.apwiz.com) i hope i qualify. 1. it is a heck of a lot more than a file share or IM tool, or even a bunch of really effective collab tools that let you get real work done straight out of the box - it is a way of wroking that puts the most diverse info, seamlessly, into one place. 2. works anytime, anywhere, with zero admin support or additional infrastructure. none of Lotus killing costs, no servers, no web sites to setup, nothing. just works. 3. functions WITHIN and not against or around enterprise security systems, again with no additional overhead in manpower / costs / setups / downtime. 4. even of a 500Mhz system in 2000 it performed. today it sings, with > 3 gig of content active. Backup is implicit in the p2p distribution of content and groove recovers content painlessly from any avbl member after the worst of disasters. never lost one bit of info in 5 years, unless i goofed. but for me, the greatest joy has always been that Ray designed this tool to be open, to be programmable (easily) by 3rd party developers - it is indeed a full platform that raises the effectiveness of any business application you build for it, whether distributed warehouse / inventory systems, to Virtual Point of Ssales linking 200 stores of a chain into one seamless operation. Methinks the adoption of Groove by MS signals their acceptance that Groove is years ahead of their own work, or anyone elses, in this area. Frankly i expect to see the next great operating system (from MS ?) based on Groove and it's "work naturally" architecture. It is in fact, totally intuitive to have seperate workspaces with need to know security. Roles and permission have never been an issue. But yes, everyone agrees that getting data from multiple spaces / tools into a consolidated View has been an issue No more with the GWS interface that allows the building of dashboards of Groove info quite easy as well as integration to enterprise data via DataBridge. I have over 200 spaces and as many contacts being managed quite well even without. So all i can say is, try Groove out, with an open mind, forget who owns it now. It was built by Ray who built Notes so comparisons are pointless, this is way way ahead in power and simplicity and cost. THAT is the clincher, at 200$ a seat this is the first and only tool that can be effectively trickled down the supply chain, across continents, from SMEs, to the smallest factories in Asia, where > 60% of all commerce takes place, and not just the handful of enterprises that could afford collaboration engines before. Groove is truly going to change the way the world does business. best regards ashok