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Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:41 AM
from the the-collective-grows dept.
Microsoft IT
namalc writes "In a huge shot across the groupware bow, Microsoft announced today that it would acquire Groove Networks, and Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove, would become Microsoft CTO. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, had positioned Groove to straddle both the IBM/Lotus and Microsoft worlds. It will be interesting to see what direction Groove takes now."
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  • Questions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:43AM (#11900147)
    1. Who or what is Groove?
    2. What do Groove do?
    3. Why should we care that Microsoft, king of aquisitions, have acquired Yet Another Company?
    If this information had been provided in the article introduction I'd be reading about it now, rather than asking silly questions like these.
    • 1. Who or what is Groove?


      2. What do Groove do?

      virutal office
      3. Why should we care that Microsoft, king of aquisitions, have acquired Yet Another Company?

      are you new here?

        • Re:Questions (Score:4, Funny)

          by Otter (3800) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:15PM (#11900523) Journal
          Great. What's a Virtual Office? Never heard of it. At a guess it sounds like some sort of Java/XHTML/XForms "web application". Yes? No?

          Yup, that's pretty much what all groupware is -- it's software that causes open source fanboys to say "I don't see what the big deal is. I could do the same thing with NNTP, awk, MythTV, ReiserFS, two tin cans and a piece of string. All this "integration" and "working" stuff is just eye candy."

          Lotus Notes is the same thing, except that in that case the fanboys really could have done better with the cans and string.

    • CTFL (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:00PM (#11900356)
      Click the Link --- see how "Groove Networks" is underlined? The underline indicates that if you click it (with your mouse) you will be presented with more infomation.

      For example if there is a link to "Groove Networks" more information about Groove Networks will appear! Wow!

      • Re:Questions (Score:4, Informative)

        by stevelaniel (464290) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:25PM (#11900677) Homepage
        Has captwheeler actually used Groove? It seems doubtful; it appears that his description of Groove comes from a cursory glance at the website.

        Groove is a tool to help groups work together across corporate boundaries. It is not a web tool; it uses a totally separate set of protocols. It uses the Simple Symmetric Transfer Protocol when it's in peer-to-peer mode. It tries to connect directly to remote clients, but if that fails -- because, say, there's a firewall in the middle -- the Groove client can connect to remote "relay servers," which are store-and-forward machines. The remote Groove client sitting behind the firewall then downloads the data from its relay server.

        Groove is both a platform and an app. The platform is a set of functions to make other apps "Groovy" -- i.e., so that you can make your app support peer-to-peer groupware functions. The app is a collection of tools -- IM, chat, a notepad, a little drawing tool, file sharing, and so forth -- that use the Groove libraries. I've always viewed the Groove app itself as a proof of concept for the platform; building a community of developers around the platform has always been Groove's goal.

        Please don't write any description of the product unless you actually know what it does. And please don't think you know what it does just because you've looked at Groove's website. That sort of uniformed spewage gives Slashdot a bad name.

          • Oh thats not technical enough! comes the reply....

            Nope. Your reply wasn't just non-technical, it was WRONG. Calling Groove "web based" is a vile misrepresenation of what it does. That's about as bad as describing the Dodge Viper as a "horse based vehicle" just because you saw the phrase "550 horsepower" on its spec sheet.

            It suggests that Groove uses some protocols similar to HTTP or HTML (and thus that it might be interoperable with non-proprietary client software). If a solution is "web based", it

  • Lotus Notes?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:43AM (#11900148)
    I guess the MS BOB team needed someone they could look down on.

      • Notes sucks, hard. Outlook, for all its problems, blows it out of the water. I always feel sorry for people stuck using Notes at work.

        While I agree that the Notes client is quirky at best (and downright nasty for some people), Domino (the Notes server) blows Exchange right out of the water.

        It is one of the very few corporate "solutions" that got that whole security thing down right from the start: it has been designed and developed to provide end-to-end security and it shows (in a good way).
        Likewise, I

        • That's a good point. It's odd that Notes has the Worst Client Ever (seriously, I've written better on my Commodore 64), and yet possibly the best mail server ever, at least outside of mainframe space. How the heck did these ever become one product?

  • Mistake: (Score:5, Funny)

    by rdc_uk (792215) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:46AM (#11900187)
    "It will be _interesting_ to see what direction Groove takes now."

    I believe you have mis-typed "bloody obvious and deeply depressing" in that sentence.

  • Yawn... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:47AM (#11900193)
    Another day, another assimilation.

  • Wow. The God of Notes switches sides. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ip_freely_2000 (577249) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:48AM (#11900204)
    There are a TON of people using Lotus Notes. It's only recently that Exchange has exceeded Notes in number of seats used. For the developers and admins working on Notes, this is the equivalent of Linus saying "What the heck, Server 2003 ain't that bad. Let me join up."
    • But since Exchange only recently exceeded Notes, wouldn't it be fair to say that Ray Ozzie can bring his expertise to the table and make Exchange that much better? I think that's one of the improvements we'll see.
        • I don't think IBM has been doing much with Lotus Notes lately. A little bit with Domino server but even there it conflicts too much with WebSphere. I think IBM really dropped the ball with lotus notes.
        • Notes is the single worst application I've encountered in my 20-year career in software development, both from a UI and usability perspective. To be fair, many of the usability issues I've encountered in Notes can be chalked up to poor DB design by the Notes admin -- the UI problems, however, are pure Lotus.

          The UI issues of Notes are shared by most Lotus products -- Lotus' concept of UI is rather different than Microsoft's, and was the one thing I hated most about working for Lotus back when I was on the
    • There are a TON of people using Lotus Notes. It's only recently that Exchange has exceeded Notes in number of seats used.

      You neglected to mention that Notes has the dubious priviledge of being hated by both users and admins, while Exchange even though being pain for admins, is generally well received by corporate users. Notes was an unwieldy, diseased, monster. Most sane corporations have long replaced it with HTTP based systems combined with IMAP servers or Exchange.

      • Re:Wow. The God of Notes switches sides. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by chthon (580889) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:54PM (#11901132) Homepage Journal

        Philips worldwide uses Lotus Notes, despite the fact that they are a premium client of Microsoft.

        The reason is that everybodies mail is encrypted.

        The decision to change to Lotus Notes was made after it was discovered that the sysadmins could read all mail, also from upper management. With Lotus Notes that is not possible.

    • Re:Wow. The God of Notes switches sides. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ScentCone (795499) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:11PM (#11900488)
      There are a TON of people using Lotus Notes. It's only recently that Exchange has exceeded Notes in number of seats used. For the developers and admins working on Notes, this is the equivalent of Linus saying "What the heck, Server 2003 ain't that bad. Let me join up."

      Hmmm. Then how shall we explain all of the people that have begged us consultants to pry them loose from the Lotus Notes Grip Of Doom and get them onto an Exchange platform? I've never, ever, once, been asked about going the other direction, and have not seen a single organization starting from scratch and thinking: "Can't wait to start using Notes!"

      Nope, for most non-technical businesses, it's Exchange, SharePoint, and a rent-a-brain to get it into shape... and then, really, not much work at all for anyone other than a luke-warm admin body.

    • Attn Bashers... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dave21212 (256924) <dav@spamcop.net> on Thursday March 10 2005, @02:40PM (#11902734) Homepage Journal

      Please, when you are bashing Lotus Notes, if it's the mail client you have issue with, try to state that. Saying you don't like Lotus Notes is like saying you had a bad experience with a car you owned in college, therefor all cars suck !

      If you don't like the mail client, use Outlook instead, the servers have IMAP and POP.
      If your apps suck, thank a developer (I guess if a VB app you used once sucked, that would mean all computers suck or something?).
      Red Box of Death ? Try moving to a version from this MILLENNIUM !

      Letsee, I remember distinctly years ago when LoveBug virus hit, everyone was down but the Notes folks... the UI may not be exactly like Microsoft (which is why I think many of you don't like it, it's not Windows:) but the "mail" is robust and secure enough that it doesn't get viruses, you can restore a single user or many (Exchange 2k3 just recently got that I think), and the PKI security is enough that the CIA, FBI, NSA and other TLOs have to use it. Or, if you prefer, you can authenticate using LDAP (even to Active Directory) and even BE the LDAP authentication server for other apps.

      Sure, the next argument is that small little 8 person companies don't need the level of security, failover, extensibility, etc. that an enterprise environment requires... That's true, but they don't want Exchange and the overhead it requires either.


      A special note to the consultant or whomever in another posting here - *you* haven't converted any shops to Notes lately (and you are The World???) - but the net turnover last year was almost 1500 big shops switching from Microsuck to Lotus (next time research before you slam). Check out the recent case studies [ibm.com] if you like.

      For those folks that care, you should know that Lotus Notes isn't email software - email is like 10% of what it does... Lotus is workflow applications, web applications, blogs, middleware and integration, document management, presence awareness (Lotus Sametime IM is #1 in the Fortune 500). And let's not forget, they support open standards more than anyone, period (you would think OSS folks would get this???) If you want you data in XML, you got it... with Microsuck you get their closed version. You can have an app server that runs Domino, attaches to MySQL, output pages using Perl and PHP... anything you want really (simply put, it's incredibly extensible).

      Platforms [lotus.com] ? You can run it on Windows, AIX, Solaris, z/OS, iSeries, o yeah, they even have a version FOR LINUX, RedHat and UnitedLinux certified ! (where's Exchange for Linux?).

      Check it out for yourself [ibm.com].

  • This should be a great thing for Groove. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sheetrock (152993) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:48AM (#11900207) Homepage Journal
    And for Office users in general. Microsoft appears to be taking seriously the concept of the remote office, and seems to be pushing NetMeeting more vigorously -- Groove would fit into this scheme quite nicely, and permit a level of interoperability with other groupware vendors Microsoft has lacked to this point.

    Conversely, Groove gets to present its unique approach to a larger audience than ever before, as well as having better access to improve and extend its compatibility with Microsoft products.

    It's an exciting time for laptop warriors, that's for sure! Never before has this level of versatility been offered.

  • MS Press Release (Score:5, Informative)

    by jmcmurry (3759) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:48AM (#11900209) Homepage
    Here's a press release [microsoft.com] from Microsoft with more information and some Q&A with Ozzie and Jeff Raikes, Microsoft group vice president of their Information Worker Business group.

  • OS X then? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dark Paladin (116525) * <jhummel@johnhum m e l.net> on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:48AM (#11900211) Homepage
    So if Microsoft will be incorporating these elements into Microsoft Office, will that include the OS X line? Right now I use Virtual PC to connect with my coworkers in our various Groove spaces (and while I know there are some OS X third party tools to connect to Groove shares, they're not exactly the same - besides, I'd have to get my company to pay an extra fee, and they're not going to do *that* just for me).

    Groove is an interesting and pretty secure P2P system, and I wouldn't mind being able to use it without having to fire up a second OS on my Powerbook just to use it.

  • Microsoft "innovates" again! (Score:3, Funny)

    by cosjef (247890) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:50AM (#11900234)
    Wow, they must REALLY be running out of ideas to sell more copies of Office.

    This is great news for OOo.
  • I was exploring and using it to explore colloboration. With MS buying it, I now know that it will never go to other platforms - Mac, Linux. Oh well.....

  • Good Riddance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IgnoramusMaximus (692000) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:52AM (#11900258)
    Lotus Notes was universally hated throughout every corporation I came in contact with, IBM included. The only people who hyped this thing were marketing drones, "visionary CTOs" and pointy-haired bosses.

    Virtually all functions of LotusNotes are better served by other technologies, like the classic Apache/PHP/SQL combos etc. (Keep in mind that LotusNotes evolved in parallel with the WWW but most corporations were completely unaware of HTTP until Microsoft "discovered" it)

    It is quite amusing to me that someone would proudly take credit for the creation of that monster. I think it goes to show tha there is no such thing as bad publicity for self-promoting "geniuses" ....

    • Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

      by IgnoramusMaximus (692000) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:14PM (#11900517)
      Good Riddance (Score:-1, Troll)

      This concludes the test of how many of Slashdotters actually ever saw LotusNotes... obviously none with mod points.

    • Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 3waygeek (58990) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:25PM (#11900676)
      Exactly right, and I used to work for Lotus as part of the SmartSuite dev team. Notes is pure evil.

    • Lotus Notes- Bad/Good (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cbelt3 (741637) <cbelt@y a h o o.com> on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:30PM (#11900792) Journal
      IMHO, like any other architectured overwhelmingly centralized system, the suckiness of Notes systems depends on the implementers and users. I've used Notes since '96, and developed in Notes since '96 too. Sure, it sucks compared to Apache/PHP/SQL combos etc. But it's a backwards compatible one stop shopping solution for content creation, management, dissemination. And yeah, it's been web enabled since like 1995, but most corps don't use that functionality cause the application's interface is pretty atrocious through the web side, security, blah, blah, blah.

      M$'s "Exchange" isn't a centralized solution per se- it depends on all the other M$ crap working together. Notes can stand alone, and IT RUNS ON Linux ! [lotus.com]

      I hope IBM Keeps maintaining Notes, but I have an ugly feeling that they're going to let it obsolete and be replaced with... a general mess of loosely cooperative stuff that /. ers will just loove making tons of money playing with. Oh well.

      PS- I don't think you're a troll- you just suffered with bad implementations, like everyone else. You know the drill- you can write spaghetti code in any language [slashdot.org]

    • Sure, as a former Chief Architect at Lotus and IBM, I may be biased . . . but I actually knew how to use Notes. Every time someone complained about Notes, it was not Notes they were complaining about. They were complaining about some crappy Notes DB that was so poorly designed that it worked horribly. Put a bug tracking system in Notes; good for under several hundred bugs. Anything more, and you can't do it easily. As for Apache/PHP/SQL, sure, you could reproduce what you could do in Notes, to a point. But, it would cost you A LOT MORE, and you would never get off-line capabilities. Something those of us on plane trips always appreciated. So, don't complain about the technology when you should be complaining about the implementation. Notes was good for certain things. RDBMSs are good at other things. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. But don't confuse the two. Notes is not a transaction system, and despite the hype, BLOB support still sucks under RDBMSs.

  • Offer somebody some money and a stupid title and they'll pimp out their mothers.

    Anybody betting Ozzie won't last a year at Microsoft?

  • MS-centricity can only get worse (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FreeBSDbigot (162899) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:52AM (#11900266)
    Groove always seemed to be one of those really, really cool solutions, if only it weren't so tied to MS Office, Outlook, and Windows. Obviously that won't get any better now that MS owns Groove.

  • The New CTO is the big acquisition... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MLopat (848735) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:55AM (#11900308) Homepage
    While most of you probably don't care much about the products Groove Networks have in their suite, the real story here in Microsoft acquiring a new CTO. This man has an impressive track record in the technology field. He is responsible for the creation of Lotus Notes, a technology that Microsoft Exchange is just starting to catch up to both in features and install base. 100 Million people use his technology worldwide. He is also rated among the top five developers of the century.

    This article has more to do with Microsoft continuing to build an impressive array of innovators and visionaries to carry the company for another 20 years. If they happen to integrate a few of his company's technologies into the current Office suite, that's just a bonus.
  • It will be interesting to see what direction Groove takes now.

    "Dude, you're going to hell."

    Here's your handbasket.

  • what direction Groove takes now. (Score:3, Funny)

    by R.Caley (126968) on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:57AM (#11900327)
    Down then up a bit then waaaaaay down.

    Toilets outlets are always shaped that way to keep the stink down.

  • MS buy-out was the plan from day one (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:14PM (#11900514)
    This should not be a surprise to anyone who worked there or anyone they tried to recruit. (Hi there!) The Beverly, MA company was a 100% Microsoft house from the beginning with no provisions for Linux, UNIX or anything else. Why eschew crossplatform? Why use only MS for development? Why care so much about being single-platform when companies don't care about what runs back-office software? The answer is in today's headlines.

  • Groove, solution looking for a problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica (166957) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:32PM (#11900813)
    Users who have touched this software generally tend to hate it. The "groovespaces" that are used to exchange data don't cooperate with anything else, and are very annoying to manage. Really in a web-enabled environment where people have IM and collaborative editing (wiki), this product serves no purpose whatsoever. If MS did not buy them they would be dead in three years.

  • Boy oh boy are they asking for trouble (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gelfling (6534) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:37PM (#11900909) Homepage Journal
    When we bought Lotus and by default Ray Ozzie and the Notes creators we inherited a tiny development culture that was utterly impenetrable. As much as Lotus kept us at arms length and did everything their own way, the Notes dudes wouldn't even let us on site. Hell they wouldn't let Lotus on site either. They just stayed locked up in Ray Ozzie's barn, crunching code. A big part of Notes failure to grow and develop and frankly, thrive, the way we wanted was the technical brilliance and organizational paralysis that the Ozzie-ites created. Eventually we found it easier to bypass them and this is why Notes 6 came out 2 years after Notes 5 which was 4 years late and is why Notes 7 is more than a year late and there are serious discussions over whether Notes itself won't be submerged into Workplace.

  • Microsoft has owned... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ArmenTanzarian (210418) on Thursday March 10 2005, @12:51PM (#11901090) Homepage Journal
    30% of the company for some time. Developers from Groove sit in Redmond and developers from Microsoft sit in Beverly Mass. Groove has time and again scooped features Microsoft has envisioned but been unable to rollout in basic OS functionality (just too much to code, inject, test with X set of features, make work on an ancient machine).

    I'm a long-time Groove user and have dabbled in component development for a little over a year. Until recently, Groove had a .NET API for injecting tools directly into the platform. They discontinued it recently in favor of a web service interface however.

    I think the product could use a bit more maturity, but I think it's got some great potential. Ownership by Microsoft, I believe, will just strengthen their marketshare. Hopefully they won't lose any of their good points.

  • Love/hate (Score:4, Informative)

    by daemoneyes (750360) on Thursday March 10 2005, @01:04PM (#11901306)
    People have a love/hate response to Groove. I know I definitely had the hate response. We got Groove at work for a project with an outside consultant, about two years ago. We got brand new PCs at the same time, and my first complaint was that Groove was extremely slow, and not just to work in. It slowed down every PC it was installed on; I think it had a memory footprint of over 200 MB! In any case, it took from one to thirty (!) minutes to launch on my 1.4 GHz/640 MB PC. We had so much trouble with it that a tech from Groove -- an engineer/programmer actually working on the product, I found out later -- to try and sort out the mess caused by starting Groove as a user other than the one that installed it. Problem: Groove by default starts as soon as you log in, I guess so it can check if you have any "instant" messages. I was never able to get satisfactory ansers to questions like: how do I fix a virus-infected file from Groove without deleting it? How do I make backups of files that are stored in a proprietary conatiner on umpty-jillion workstations? How do you manage file permissions without creating additional "spaces" just for restricted files? We were working on this project with a Danish company, and it seems the standard reaction from a Dane to a feature request is "Why would you want to do that?" This was essentially my response to Groove, which is just another stinking heap of buzzword-compliant bloatware that does nothing for anyone except make PHBs think they are helping. They're not.

  • This should have a positive impact on Security (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dudeman2 (88399) on Thursday March 10 2005, @01:36PM (#11901842) Homepage
    Ray Ozzie has always designed his products with built in security - not as an afterthought. Lotus Notes pioneered RSA based encryption on desktop computers.

    It's still the most transparent and easy-to-use email security system available (note, easy to use != easy to administer). You never even think about it, once your preferences are set, emails just get encrypted and decrypted, signed and signatures verified, automatically.

    Same thing with Groove products.

    Let's see what he can do at Microsoft.

  • Horribly selfish perspective (Score:3, Funny)

    by jht (5006) on Thursday March 10 2005, @03:02PM (#11903032) Homepage Journal
    My office is in the same huge complex in Beverly as the Groove offices - so if Microsoft pumps money and bodies in there, it'll just make it more difficult to park than it already is!

    Other than that, it's really not too big a deal in my eyes. Microsoft's been pumping money into Groove for a few years now, and Groove has been putting all their development efforts into Windows for a long time (it was originally supposed to be a multiplatform product). Maybe Groove will become more than a niche product now?

    • Re:Pardon my ignorance..... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Thursday March 10 2005, @11:53AM (#11900278) Homepage Journal
      Groove is an excellent (as of a demo I saw a couple of years ago) integration of pretty much all your collaboration tools.
      Think /. and MS Office, throw in IM, and server storage, and make it work well on crap hardware.
      It's the kind of turn-key integration that will take quite a while longer to realize using FOSS.
      Truly, the pieces are all there, but getting them all to work as smoothly is non-trivial.

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