Joel Orr's World

WSJ.com - Microsoft to Buy Groove Networks

Press release and other info at Groove.net

(Don’t know if the link to WSJ will work for all; it’s a mostly-by-subscription site.) After putting $50 million into Ray Ozzie’s Groove Networks in 2001, Microsoft did not surprise me by announcing their intention to buy the company. Ray will become Microsoft’s CTO. I believe this is good for both Microsoft and Groove, at many levels. Ray is a well-respected innovator with famously down-to-earth opinions about data management and collaboration.

Ozzie came up with Notes, which became Lotus Notes, and then IBM Notes. But he decided that collaboration had matured beyond form-based sharing, and in 1997 began a years-long effort developing and refining Groove (a peer-to-peer collaborative system that is both inexpensive and powerful).

After the 2001 MS investment, Groove snuggled up to MS standards as it never had before. Without worrying about whether the choices were based on getting $$ from Bill or on what was good for the end user, I opine that it has indeed been good for the user.

The latest Groove release, 3.0, behaves much like an XP feature for grownups. It integrates very well with Office.