Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks

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."

Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Wow. The God of Notes switches sides.

[ip_freely_2000]

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."

OS X then?

[Dark Paladin]

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.

Re:Mistake:

[MindStalker]

Yes, but given that this guy will be made CTO of Microsoft obviously they are interesting in his ideas and where he can take Microsoft. May mean good things for Microsoft as a whole.

Might be a good time to check out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hula [hula-project.org]

Just another weak collaboration tool

[0xDEADC0DE]

I don't care how easy it is to chat and share files, that does not really make teams work that well together. Teams need to be sharing the right information that actually helps them reach decisions.

One groupware "tool" for developers that I have been really happy with is http://readyset.tigris.org/ [tigris.org].

Re:Wow. The God of Notes switches sides.

[ScentCone]

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.

Lotus Notes- Bad/Good

[cbelt3]

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]

Groove, solution looking for a problem

[Ars-Fartsica]

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.

Re:Benefits of the Notes creator

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt Ray will do anything with Exchange. I've worked on the bowels of Lotus Notes [damienkatz.net] and I've also done a little development work with Exchange. The two are extremely different, from storage to security to development nearly every facet is different, I doubt Ray wants to spend time thinking about someone else's disjointed architecture. Besides, Ray has already gone on record as saying that email is doomed (I don't agree), but that tells me he isn't at all interested in the email space.

However, I am very suprised that he's going to be CTO of MS, he's always been super friendly and encouraging to me even when I was just a peon, it seems like the wrong position for a guy like him. You'd think the MS CTO would need to be a real ballbreaker. I really hope it works out for him.

Damien Katz

Re:Wow. The God of Notes switches sides.

[chthon]

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:The New CTO is the big acquisition...

[tbuskey]

Back when Ray Ozzie was heading up Notes, I saw a quote from Bill Gates along the lines of: There are 5 top programmers in the world today. 4 work for me and Ray Ozzie is the other one.

Re:Mistake:

[Thanatopsis]

I meet Ray at a conference about five years ago. Seems like a nice enough guy but Groove unless it sold for 1 Billion dollars was a total loss for the investors. A total of 155 Million dollars of VC [vcdeal.com] went into the company. That's Right 155 MILLION. They had a FIFTH round of investment in 2003 of 38 Million. That's an insane amount of capital just to sell to MS for a few hundred million in stock. The investors would have been better off just buying MS stock. I cannot seem to find the terms of the deal online.

This should have a positive impact on Security

[dudeman2]

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.