Monday, March 15, 2004

Onfolio, a.k.a. Project 31, has gone live.  Congratulations to JJ Allaire and the team!  A great day for rich client innovation. 7:19:45 AM

Sunday, March 14, 2004

Congrats to Tom Malone for the launch of The Future of Work, a terriffic look at how decentralization is affecting the nature of the organization, the structure of business and our work lives. When we first launched Lotus Notes in the early 90's, it was an era of Reengineering The Corporation, in which companies were reducing the cost of coordination internally through business process reengineering.  Companies embraced Lotus Notes, an advanced communications technology for the time, reflecting the changing nature of the organization from centralized hierarchical structures toward more decentralized work flows. When I left Iris/Lotus/IBM in 1997, I did so primarily because in '95-'96 I saw, in our customers, the beginnings of something quite significant: they were extending their core business processes and practices outward to partners, suppliers, and in some cases even customers.  When we launched Groove's V1 product in 2001 and began selling it to enterprises, our primary focus was on how it was an advance in decentralized communications that would reduce the cost of coordination externally in a manner not possible with technologies primarily designed for enterprise use.  The fact that enterprises and government have embraced Groove truly reflects the changing nature of business from centralized structures toward networked, decentralized organizational relationships. Over the past 12-18 months, we've seen some other very significant technology-catalyzed changes occurring in business, in society, and in our everyday lives.  Last year was most certainly the "year of the laptop".  Broadband is now ever-more pervasive, and 2003 was also undeniably the "year of WiFi".  Our PC usage patterns have been transformed: we carry them to meetings, use them at hotels and on client sites and at home.  Whereas most of us used to do most of our work in our "office" or "cube", our most important work is now done in our "virtual office" - the one that is implemented in software on PC's and a variety of devices tucked away in our backpack, briefcase, purse and pocket. This isn't a small trend: its impact on business, society and our lives is huge.  I would strongly recommend that you spend some quality time with this presentation based on a landmark study done in 2003 on the pervasiveness of off-site work. I sit here writing this as we're about about to lift the veil from what I believe you'll find truly represents the next generation of communications software, Groove v3.0.  Our primary design goal for this product, based very specifically on how it has been being used by our customers over the past three years, was to implement, for its users, the essence of their "virtual office".  Where we do our work together, and where we want to do our work together because of how it feels and just works.  We now live in an era of extreme mobility, where the attributes of secure communications, coordination, and synchronization are core to most everything we do in terms of information work.  An era where our tools and mobile devices must be specifically designed with advanced, elegant awareness & notification to help us to efficiently swarm around our joint activities, and to aggregate and prioritize notifications in ways that help us to conserve our attention and cope with information overload. Think of how you yourself work, on a day-to-day basis.  This era is one of virtual work performed by a highly decentralized workforce.  Technology's role in this era is to bring us effective horizontal fusion - reducing the cost of coordination between us in a manner not possible with centralized technologies.  It should reflect the changing nature of work, from the physical workplace, toward the decentralized workspace.  And it most certainly will. 3:58:36 PM

Thursday, July 03, 2003

Extreme Mobility: a rant that I had to write after reading Tim, Dave, and this all in one day. 11:43:15 AM

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

Peter, it's great to hear your thoughts; I couldn't agree more.  John just gave me a demo of the latest & greatest, and I'm truly pumped.  He demo'ed it to me using a WinForms web services program running against localhost, which kind of blew my mind as we were brainstorming about the kinds of "outboard" cross-telespace utilities that could be whipped up in nothing flat. Later - a coincidence: Jon also talks about localhost web services. Jon, your talk about mail brings up a discussion that I had with someone lately about email, linking, and transparency.  One of the unfortunate aspects about "googling email" is that there are really no inbound links except those that can be reverse engineered through threading.  But in social systems, those are the "strong ties" - the obvious relationships.  What is more interesting, I believe, are the "weak ties" that would emerge if people outside of your social group started pointing into an interesting message of yours.  (Weak Ties are precisely why I read blogs!!)  Imagine the field day that Google could have if 1) all email files had access controls removed, and 2) people started surfing each others' email messages. Unrealistic, right?  Well, think again.  Why have we grown so accustomed to the social norm that email should be private?  Think about it.  Start small.  And remember that your company owns your inbox and outbox.  What if all engineers within a company were given a new email address when they started, and were told "just use it for business" and "please note that everything that you do in email is in public view.  In order to prevent embarassing moments, please keep matters of your personal privacy OUT of your assigned email box; use Groove for private matters.  Oh, and by the way, here are the URLs of all of your team members' mailboxes, in case you care.  Oh, and by the way, here's a site where you Google across all of them.  Oh, also, I should mention that we never delete any email, by policy."  I truly, seriously wonder what would happen!?  At first, people would be shocked at not having private email, and private hotmail addresses and "groove spaces" would appear when people wanted to do something privately.  But people are creatures of convenience and habit, and more and more work would be done in the open.  And what would be the benefit to the collective productivity if we could all watch and listen to the thought processes of the stars on our teams?  What kind of interesting bots would emerge that started to watch and subscribe to relevant queries?  (I'm not just talking about voyeurs.  Customer support email interactions should be continuously watched by engineers every bit as closely as the public forums, don't you think?) Thinking even more over the edge, imagine if part of being a public company, or being a paid government employee, involved doing your email in public?  Who needs FOIA ... how about "real time disclosure"?  All of the stuff that got us into this most recent debacle - accounting - is an attempt to take the messy reality of business complexity and risk and spin it into a dubious "standardized form".  But what if all of that messy reality were known by everyone equivalently, in real time, everywhere, interpreted-as-you-will?  (Yes, for those of you who recognize the similarity in arguments, I am indeed a proponent of allowing insider trading as a better indicator of internal corporate conditions than packaged quarterly Productions.) Surely everything can't and shouldn't be transparent: SCIF-like privacy is what products like Groove are for.  Doing M&A, or concocting a stealth project?  Start a Groove shared space.  But let's get real: email is already a semi-public space.  100% of corporate email today - YOUR email - is already being read at least once before you get to read it, probably many times more.  By your ISP, by your admin.  If you're paranoid, maybe by law enforcement, your school, your Dad, your spouse, or the RIAA.  They call it "content scanning" or "virus scanning", and it's for Your Protection.  So why not just "go for it" and open up email to public viewing, so that the rest of your team, or company, or world has the benefit of linking into it?? (Ummm ... no, I won't be the first.  Sorry.  YOU be the first.) 9:04:34 PM

Tuesday, October 01, 2002

Five years ago today was my first day working on Groove - an incredible journey, and yet it's only just begun. In 1996, I had begun to feel some frustration within the Notes customer base as they were trying to push it in ways that it hadn't been designed for - particularly outside the enterprise - and as its eMail component began to dominate the usage model. Upon further analysis, this relentless drive toward eMail caused me to question the fundamentals of centralized, application server-based architectures as the basis for effective dynamic collaboration. I'd been working on Notes at that time for thirteen years, and in that it was my first day after leaving Iris/Lotus/IBM, October 1st of 1997 was quite exhilarating and more than a bit scary: I was returning to zero. My mind was abuzz: the first order of business would be to write up a document that described the essence of where my head was at. Over the next two weeks before incorporation, I'd use this rambling "Market Opportunity" document, along with a companion technical piece, to recruit the core team. We worked out of my attic for the next few months, and then moved to a big space with just some tables and whiteboards, trying to get our minds around "peer" communications and transaction systems, pouring through Richard Light's XML book that we found at Borders - trying to figure out if we should bet on this stuff, making early key decisions about C++/COM vs. Java (it was first supposed to have been in Java), and so on. What a blast... It's been fun to revisit the founding documents, if only to put things into perspective. The technology and business environments have gone through extreme highs and lows in the interim, while we've sought to stay focused and persevere, believing in that specific business value proposition. And with the help of those who have believed in us, we've been afforded the opportunity to touch hundreds of thousands of users with self-empowering desktop collaboration software, and to work very closely with about fifty of our blue-chip global enterprise customers to create real and immediate business value, growing steadily month after month. What has been accomplished through these five million lines of code in these five short years, and in terms of bootstrapping and building the beginnings of a new geometrically-growing market in 18 months, has been nothing short of breathtaking. (By comparison, Notes was first launched on its fifth anniversary - Dec 7, 1989 - at a half million lines of code.) With deepest sincerity, I salute my co-founders Ken Moore, Eric Patey, and Jack Ozzie, and the hundreds of talented, caring and believing people at Groove Networks.  An incredible team, amazing individuals.  Happy fifth. But we've surely only just begun. Although centralized contextual collaboration has been yielding value for many years and continues to mature (congrats) and merge into the application server market, dynamic "desktop collaboration" empirically shows all the signs of a new and substantial growth market, as business units return to basics in terms of understanding how use technology to make their extant interpersonal work practices more productive, and as IT continues to struggle with supporting dynamic interpersonal work in the hostile and unsecure environment that Internet eMail has become. Here's to creating real and substantive value through technology, and here's to the next five, ten, and fifteen years... 1:27:06 PM

Friday, September 20, 2002

A few comments about John Robb's liking of digital dashboards. 4:18:51 PM

Friday, September 13, 2002

Unplugged U.  This is the breeding ground for the next wave of technology-augmented communication, coordination, collaboration.  When these people enter the workforce, the nature of the workplace will be transformed ... from the edge. In case it's not obvious: we'll spend the vast majority of our time blanketed in bandwidth.  (2.5G? 3G? 11G, 54G.)  And the cellular/PCS phone isn't likely to be the access device, fundamentally because of the walled garden value added services "smart network" business model that emerged from a view of spectrum as a scarce commodity.  It's not.  Smart devices, operating in a peer manner via generic plumbing and thin servers.  Powerful software, thin services.  Cool PCs of a broad variety of mobile form factors; pocketable WiFi devices - even phones.  Personal, "federated" and transparently self-synchronizing with one another. As Dan so estutely observes in this essay when he talks about the role of cell phone usage, we continue to change how we choose to fill the time in the "whitespace" between our activities.  Ponderous thought, then radio or walkman, then mobile voicemail and conversations, then blackberry or i-mode or sms messages, then ...?  Perhaps most importantly for enterprises, technology has enabled the whitespace to be leveraged by time-pressured people on the move, already significantly reducing the cost of coordination within sales forces, and between laptop-armed managers and executives.  Reduced human transaction cost, reduced agency cost.  To a line of business with critical processes and projects that are people- and knowledge-intensive, time and coordination matters, and collaboration technology delivers. Perhaps most importantly for individuals, technology has enabled the whitespace to be filled with whatever happens to be meaningful to us.  We've got choice, and ultimately we're in control of our own time and attention.  Exciting things are happening in edge-based communications; we've just barely scratched the surface.  If you want to know where things are going, ask a teenager or new college recruit.  Talk to the oyayubi sedai.  It's relevant. 3:28:34 PM     Clay Shirky on online community.  Clay's contrasting of "audiences" versus "communities" is also relevant in the enterprise environment.  "Employees", like "audiences", are intentionally gathered sets of individuals, linked by organizational affiliation and by the business processes within which they need to participate.  The bonds that hold communities together, however, are edge-based forces - the same forces that bring people together to solve problems, to innovate. Center vs. edge.  Orchestrated organization vs. self-organization.  Business process vs. business practice.  Fragility vs. resiliency.  Complexity vs. chaos.  Control vs. empowerment. 7:44:58 AM

© Copyright 2004 Ray Ozzie. Last update: 3/15/2004; 9:45:24 AM.