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March 10, 2005 11:45 AM PST
Microsoft to buy Groove Networks
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applications on top of Microsoft software. The move also advances Redmond's strategy of adding features to its Office product line in an effort to get customers to upgrade, he said.
DeGroot noted, though, that Microsoft already has a number of collaboration-related products, such as Live Meeting conferencing software.
"To some extent, Microsoft has had a shotgun approach to collaboration," DeGroot said. "It's not clear to me which of Microsoft's approaches to collaboration will be a winner."
Chairman and chief
software architect, Microsoft
Microsoft executives said that the addition of Groove gives the company three approaches to collaboration: a server-based method for sharing Office documents through SharePoint; real-time collaboration with Live Meeting; and now Groove Virtual Office for people who are geographically dispersed and need to work with people inside and outside their organization.
Microsoft intends to continue offering the Groove application on a hosted basis, said Steven Sinovsky, senior vice president at Microsoft's Information Worker division.
Gates said Microsoft will create a long-term "road map" for integrating Groove's software, but some capabilities, such as authentication and peer-to-peer, will surface in the shorter term in Longhorn. Existing work at Microsoft will be combined with what Groove's employees are doing, he said.
"Clearly, a big thing of Longhorn is going to be its peer-to-peer capability, and having Groove help us pull that together is going to help us do an even better job on that," he said.
Ozzie, who battled Microsoft for years when he was at IBM's Lotus division, will make a significant adjustment as part of the larger Microsoft organization, Forrester's Root said.
"It's ironic that the creator of Lotus Notes will be reporting to Bill Gates," Root said. "The whole point of Groove is to let people work together when they're not in the same location--we'll see if Ray can eat his own dog food."
See more CNET content tagged:
Groove Networks Inc.,
Ray Ozzie,
collaboration,
Bill Gates,
founder
Ray Ozzie like many others decided if you cannot beat them join them. He designed Groove to be an office compatible app from the start. Maybe now the collaboration and communication mess in MS will finally be resolved by Ozzie (new CTO).
Another company that I think will go this way is MindMap and maybe even Salesforce if Microsoft CRM doesn't get going soon!
The key is not to just communicate, but to actually collaborate, and that requires that people actually get down to the meaning of the thing that they are working on.
A really interesting and useful collaboration tool for software developers is ReadySET Pro (http://www.readysetpro.com/). It actually gives teams a big head start on formulating their use cases, test cases, security plans, requirements documents, design documents, and project plans.
Good luck, Microsoft, in salvaging this white elephant of a technology. There's a reason groove's however many years of business have netted them a whopping 100 customers - everything this product does can be done by other technologies already that are stable and extensively deployed.
MS is still pushing the old early 1980s bums-on-seats manual information systems, and will surely continue to loose market share as business discovers the increased productivity in deploying a desktop Linux system.
American businesses continue to be disadvantaged by the Gates designed desktop, and his company must take the lions share of responsibility for holding back the advancement of office computing, and by association the American economy, while he follows his dream of being the world's richest individual.
Thank common sense and social necessity for the Open Source initiative.