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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."
- Who or what is Groove?
- What do Groove do?
- Why should we care that Microsoft, king of aquisitions, have acquired Yet Another Company?
If this information had been provided in the article introduction I'd be reading about it now, rather than asking silly questions like these.I guess the MS BOB team needed someone they could look down on.
"It will be _interesting_ to see what direction Groove takes now."
I believe you have mis-typed "bloody obvious and deeply depressing" in that sentence.
Another day, another assimilation.
There are a TON of people using Lotus Notes. It's only recently that Exchange has exceeded Notes in number of seats used. For the developers and admins working on Notes, this is the equivalent of Linus saying "What the heck, Server 2003 ain't that bad. Let me join up."
Conversely, Groove gets to present its unique approach to a larger audience than ever before, as well as having better access to improve and extend its compatibility with Microsoft products.
It's an exciting time for laptop warriors, that's for sure! Never before has this level of versatility been offered.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Here's a press release from Microsoft with more information and some Q&A with Ozzie and Jeff Raikes, Microsoft group vice president of their Information Worker Business group.
So if Microsoft will be incorporating these elements into Microsoft Office, will that include the OS X line? Right now I use Virtual PC to connect with my coworkers in our various Groove spaces (and while I know there are some OS X third party tools to connect to Groove shares, they're not exactly the same - besides, I'd have to get my company to pay an extra fee, and they're not going to do *that* just for me).
Groove is an interesting and pretty secure P2P system, and I wouldn't mind being able to use it without having to fire up a second OS on my Powerbook just to use it.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Wow, they must REALLY be running out of ideas to sell more copies of Office.
This is great news for OOo.
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.
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" ....
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.
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.
It will be interesting to see what direction Groove takes now.
"Dude, you're going to hell."
Here's your handbasket.
Toilets outlets are always shaped that way to keep the stink down.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Click the Link --- see how "Groove Networks" is underlined? The underline indicates that if you click it (with your mouse) you will be presented with more infomation.
For example if there is a link to "Groove Networks" more information about Groove Networks will appear! Wow!
I don't care how easy it is to chat and share files, that does not really make teams work that well together. Teams need to be sharing the right information that actually helps them reach decisions.
One groupware "tool" for developers that I have been really happy with is http://readyset.tigris.org/.
No it won't. We all know what direction Groove will take now.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
What, you mean like how Office isn't available on Macs?
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.
M$'s "Exchange" isn't a centralized solution per se- it depends on all the other M$ crap working together. Notes can stand alone, and IT RUNS ON Linux !
I hope IBM Keeps maintaining Notes, but I have an ugly feeling that they're going to let it obsolete and be replaced with... a general mess of loosely cooperative stuff that /. ers will just loove making tons of money playing with. Oh well.
PS- I don't think you're a troll- you just suffered with bad implementations, like everyone else. You know the drill- you can write spaghetti code in any language
Users who have touched this software generally tend to hate it. The "groovespaces" that are used to exchange data don't cooperate with anything else, and are very annoying to manage. Really in a web-enabled environment where people have IM and collaborative editing (wiki), this product serves no purpose whatsoever. If MS did not buy them they would be dead in three years.
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.
30% of the company for some time. Developers from Groove sit in Redmond and developers from Microsoft sit in Beverly Mass. Groove has time and again scooped features Microsoft has envisioned but been unable to rollout in basic OS functionality (just too much to code, inject, test with X set of features, make work on an ancient machine).
.NET API for injecting tools directly into the platform. They discontinued it recently in favor of a web service interface however.
I'm a long-time Groove user and have dabbled in component development for a little over a year. Until recently, Groove had a
I think the product could use a bit more maturity, but I think it's got some great potential. Ownership by Microsoft, I believe, will just strengthen their marketshare. Hopefully they won't lose any of their good points.
People have a love/hate response to Groove. I know I definitely had the hate response. We got Groove at work for a project with an outside consultant, about two years ago. We got brand new PCs at the same time, and my first complaint was that Groove was extremely slow, and not just to work in. It slowed down every PC it was installed on; I think it had a memory footprint of over 200 MB! In any case, it took from one to thirty (!) minutes to launch on my 1.4 GHz/640 MB PC. We had so much trouble with it that a tech from Groove -- an engineer/programmer actually working on the product, I found out later -- to try and sort out the mess caused by starting Groove as a user other than the one that installed it. Problem: Groove by default starts as soon as you log in, I guess so it can check if you have any "instant" messages. I was never able to get satisfactory ansers to questions like: how do I fix a virus-infected file from Groove without deleting it? How do I make backups of files that are stored in a proprietary conatiner on umpty-jillion workstations? How do you manage file permissions without creating additional "spaces" just for restricted files? We were working on this project with a Danish company, and it seems the standard reaction from a Dane to a feature request is "Why would you want to do that?" This was essentially my response to Groove, which is just another stinking heap of buzzword-compliant bloatware that does nothing for anyone except make PHBs think they are helping. They're not.
Ray Ozzie has always designed his products with built in security - not as an afterthought. Lotus Notes pioneered RSA based encryption on desktop computers.
It's still the most transparent and easy-to-use email security system available (note, easy to use != easy to administer). You never even think about it, once your preferences are set, emails just get encrypted and decrypted, signed and signatures verified, automatically.
Same thing with Groove products.
Let's see what he can do at Microsoft.
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
Please, when you are bashing Lotus Notes, if it's the mail client you have issue with, try to state that. Saying you don't like Lotus Notes is like saying you had a bad experience with a car you owned in college, therefor all cars suck !
If you don't like the mail client, use Outlook instead, the servers have IMAP and POP.
If your apps suck, thank a developer (I guess if a VB app you used once sucked, that would mean all computers suck or something?).
Red Box of Death ? Try moving to a version from this MILLENNIUM !
Letsee, I remember distinctly years ago when LoveBug virus hit, everyone was down but the Notes folks... the UI may not be exactly like Microsoft (which is why I think many of you don't like it, it's not Windows:) but the "mail" is robust and secure enough that it doesn't get viruses, you can restore a single user or many (Exchange 2k3 just recently got that I think), and the PKI security is enough that the CIA, FBI, NSA and other TLOs have to use it. Or, if you prefer, you can authenticate using LDAP (even to Active Directory) and even BE the LDAP authentication server for other apps.
Sure, the next argument is that small little 8 person companies don't need the level of security, failover, extensibility, etc. that an enterprise environment requires... That's true, but they don't want Exchange and the overhead it requires either.
A special note to the consultant or whomever in another posting here - *you* haven't converted any shops to Notes lately (and you are The World???) - but the net turnover last year was almost 1500 big shops switching from Microsuck to Lotus (next time research before you slam). Check out the recent case studies if you like.
For those folks that care, you should know that Lotus Notes isn't email software - email is like 10% of what it does... Lotus is workflow applications, web applications, blogs, middleware and integration, document management, presence awareness (Lotus Sametime IM is #1 in the Fortune 500). And let's not forget, they support open standards more than anyone, period (you would think OSS folks would get this???) If you want you data in XML, you got it... with Microsuck you get their closed version. You can have an app server that runs Domino, attaches to MySQL, output pages using Perl and PHP... anything you want really (simply put, it's incredibly extensible).
Platforms ? You can run it on Windows, AIX, Solaris, z/OS, iSeries, o yeah, they even have a version FOR LINUX, RedHat and UnitedLinux certified ! (where's Exchange for Linux?).
Check it out for yourself.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
My office is in the same huge complex in Beverly as the Groove offices - so if Microsoft pumps money and bodies in there, it'll just make it more difficult to park than it already is!
Other than that, it's really not too big a deal in my eyes. Microsoft's been pumping money into Groove for a few years now, and Groove has been putting all their development efforts into Windows for a long time (it was originally supposed to be a multiplatform product). Maybe Groove will become more than a niche product now?
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."