Microsoft
Collaborates With Groove
We’ve
been following Groove for a long time, watching it find itself as a
niche player in the ad hoc collaboration market, based on its user
friendly, easy to assemble, collaboration network.
So it was with some trepidation that we noted that Microsoft
had deepened its relationship with Groove (they were already a
significant investor), by purchasing the company and persuading its
founder, Ray Ozzie (also the inventor of Lotus Notes), to become a
CTO at Microsoft. We
didn’t want to see Groove and its interesting approach to
supporting collaboration just disappear.
But
Groove and Microsoft, in a joint interview, reassured me that this
would not be the case. The
plan is to run Groove as a separate company, continuing to sell and
support its products, and, at the same time, looking for
opportunities to integrate its technology with Microsoft products.
Microsoft has had access to the Groove technologies for
several years (as part of their investment agreement) and is already
using Groove with various Microsoft products such as Outlook,
SharePoint, and Office, but this will permit tighter integration and
more opportunities.
Exactly
how Ray Ozzie will integrate with the Microsoft culture is a good
question, although he is reported to like the idea.
When you’re in a small company, it’s hard to get your
products into thousands, let alone millions of hands.
When you’re part of a bigger organization, your ideas can
get much farther. Microsoft
will also be able to help make Groove into a global product by
providing internationalization.
In
any case, Microsoft thinks the Groove acquisition will change the
playing field. The
collaboration space is very competitive.
(And, we’d note, collaboration is becoming more important,
more mainstream, as it becomes less of a separate offering and more
of something that is integrated into every facet of information
work, broadly defined. We
expect to see collaboration as a feature of manufacturing and CRM
systems.)
Microsoft
sees its role as helping people to do office work, everything from
creating documents to analyzing business models to collaborating.
But the nature of work is changing and so is the office.
Today, it’s becoming anywhere your laptop happens to be.
Your office team is changing, too, from a few colleagues in
your own department to include partners, customers, suppliers, and
contractors, with no common network or IT infrastructure.
Microsoft
was good at providing infrastructure inside a company’s
boundaries. Groove provides cross-organizational services, which
lets us look at new services for these workers.
Microsoft
wants to retain the lightweight, ad hoc collaboration that Groove is
famous for so that it can offer a range of solutions to let users
work the way they want to work, from light weight tools for users
without an IT department, to controlled servers and services for
supported workers within a formal infrastructure.
Microsoft
wants to keep not just Groove but also the Groove people.
That’s one reason they will keep the Beverly operation; the
other is to have a technical foothold on the east coast.
Most west coast vendors (Sun, Novell, et al) do that;
Microsoft never did before.
Microsoft
is hoping to add its 100,000 trained Office Systems solutions
developers to Groove’s existing partners, who are mainly
horizontal resellers and ISVs.
