Groove has been assimilated by The Borg03/10/2005 07:18 PM
You have to wonder if Ray Ozzie was
just building a company to be acquired
by Microsoft. Groove
used only ActiveX technologies, so it couldn't be ported to other platforms,
so it was purely Windows. It fills in a nice hole in Microsoft's
Office/Outlook capabilities. It'd be a GREAT addition to MS Office.
Although Groove was originally brought
out as a development platform, they didn't seem to get that many business
partners to help them develop applications (their out-of-the-box apps gave
customers simple workflow and form design which is still gobs better than
Microsoft's horrible efforts w/ OneNote) . And after so many years,
they only have roughly 100 customers. Venture capitalists and MS
plowed an immense amount of capital (over $100M according to news.com)
into Groove to keep it going.
IMHO, the reason most large companies
didn't like Groove was that it was not something that is managed centrally.
However, this is exactly what SMBs want. I have a few clients
that only have a few employees who don't want to install a server but want
to be able to share information. While I think this is utter lunacy,
they don't and this is the type of customer that Groove would work best
with. It's even better than it'll become part of Office 12 (hopefully)...it'll
finally give customers a reason to upgrade their copies of Office2K
MS will finally get a person w/ some
vision, especially since they hired a few of the core Iris team before
this. The Gates/Ballmer team hasn't had this in a while and no matter
how hard they whip the slaves, they can't get something interesting out.
Here's to more interesting times ahead...
Now, it's back to work on my secret
project that Bill will want to buy next so he can convince people to upgrade
to Longhorn
Ken's Blog
Groove has been assimilated by The Borg03/10/2005 07:18 PM
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