Collaborating by Groove
Published: 16 Mar 2004 11:55 GMT
After billions of dollars invested in PC "productivity applications" and a marketplace dominated by Microsoft, does the world need more software for so-called knowledge workers?
Ray Ozzie thinks so and, he says, macroeconomic forces are on his side.
The founder of Groove Networks argues that organisations are becoming increasingly decentralised. Instead of being tightly bound to corporate centres, workers are being unleashed, laptop in hand, to work in different locations or out of their homes. A globally connected economy allows corporations to outsource tasks from manufacturing to software programming. Independent contractors who work for several companies at once are on the rise as well.
For Ozzie, a collaboration software guru, those trends are placing demands on technology that aren't being addressed effectively today. Small groups of people need to team up on projects that can span different organisations and locations. He contends that Web applications have their limitations, as do other products, such as Lotus Notes, which Ozzie created in the mid-80s.
As Groove prepares to beta test the third release of its software, which Ozzie calls an "inflection point" for the company, Ozzie sat down with CNET News.com to talk about how technology needs to adjust to changing work dynamics. In addition, the technology visionary talked about peer-to-peer computing and the company's close relationship with industry giant (and Groove investor) Microsoft.
Q: In your most recent Web log entry, you talked about how decentralisation and peer-to-peer technology are having an impact on your government customers and on society. What has fundamentally changed since, say, your days at Lotus?
A: What collaboration software -- and technology in general -- is all about is reducing the cost of coordination in one way or another between entities who need to work with one another, whether those entities are individuals or organisations. When I started working on Notes back in 1982, and when we finally shipped in, like, 1989, I guess I had the changing nature of the organisation on my mind. In the enterprise at that point in time -- it is hard to imagine going back that far -- the concept of re-engineering a corporation had become a trend.
BPR (business process re-engineering), right?
Exactly, and the whole notion was the changing nature of the organisation internally. Departments were supposed to work with one another as opposed to working in a "siloed" fashion internally. And that really drove the nature of what Notes was all about. And Notes worked very well for these big global enterprises in that zone. When we founded Groove in 1997, it was based on some things I saw happening in customers in the 1995-1996 time frame. The bleeding-edge customers using Notes were trying to use it with companies outside. They were working with groups outside their corporate boundaries. And these were big companies -- channel masters -- and they were trying to force Notes out there, and in some cases, it worked. But it was tough.
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