Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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!
Groove is a tool to help groups work together across corporate boundaries. It is not a web tool; it uses a totally separate set of protocols. It uses the Simple Symmetric Transfer Protocol when it's in peer-to-peer mode. It tries to connect directly to remote clients, but if that fails -- because, say, there's a firewall in the middle -- the Groove client can connect to remote "relay servers," which are store-and-forward machines. The remote Groove client sitting behind the firewall then downloads the data from its relay server.
Groove is both a platform and an app. The platform is a set of functions to make other apps "Groovy" -- i.e., so that you can make your app support peer-to-peer groupware functions. The app is a collection of tools -- IM, chat, a notepad, a little drawing tool, file sharing, and so forth -- that use the Groove libraries. I've always viewed the Groove app itself as a proof of concept for the platform; building a community of developers around the platform has always been Groove's goal.
Please don't write any description of the product unless you actually know what it does. And please don't think you know what it does just because you've looked at Groove's website. That sort of uniformed spewage gives Slashdot a bad name.
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.
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.
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