Tuesday, March 23, 2004

David Stutz:  "Because of this, although I agree with many of Ray's observations, I disagree with his predicted outcome. Rather than becoming the basis for a powerful network driven by the commodity exchange of schematized XML data, WinFS is more likely to be just one more in a string of proprietary Microsoft extensibility mechanisms." A very interesting essay.  Much depends upon whether you or not you believe developers will embrace this new platform "in the absence of commodity (replaceable) implementations".   Indeed, one of the most significant (and voluminous) criticisms I received privately after writing my essay relates to the increasing version fragmentation of the Windows installed base itself - particularly between corporate and consumer PCs.  Regardless of a given platform innovation's merits, will or would ISVs take deep advantage of an OS innovation that will only reach a subset of the installed base for a very, very long time?  Or have we now transitioned to a world in which there is a sustainable advantage for redistributable commodity middleware versions of "good enough" solutions?  Although "Windows bundling" used to represent a surefire way to create a de facto systems-level standard e.g. MAPI, might new Windows innovations be ultimately less utilized/leveraged than commodity middleware, given the increasing fragmentation of the market? 2:41:28 PM

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, February 26, 2004

It's been a few months since I've posted - a very busy and exciting time here at Groove. Both in terms of what's been happening in the business and market, but also because we're closing in on the first beta of Groove V3. I can't wait to tell you about the improvements in V3 ... because after having used it day in and day out for a few months now, I've simply never felt nearly this excited about a product that I've worked on. And that says a lot. More on V3 in a few weeks! For those of you who have been following Groove for quite some time, you may recall that the product's original raison d'être was to enable people "at the edge" to dynamically assemble online into secure virtual workspaces, to work together and to get something done, even if those individuals were in different organizations with completely different IT infrastructure. Today, with the gracious permission of one of our most significant customers, Groove made an announcement that I'd like to talk about for a moment. It's very significant to me for two reasons: First, the nature of how Groove is being used in this solution demonstrates to the extreme the very reason why Groove was built the way it was, from a technology and architecture perspective. Decentralization at its finest. The customer's core challenge was to enable individuals from many, many different organizations - most of whom had little or no opportunity for training - to rapidly assemble into small virtual teams to selectively share information, make decisions, get the job done, and disassemble. The individuals are geographically dispersed. They use different kinds of networks, behind different organizations' firewalls and management policies. They are very, very highly mobile. And there are few applications where the requirement for deep and effective security is more self-evident. Groove's press release can be found here. The Department of Homeland Security's press releases related to HSIN can be found here and here, while Secretary Ridge's remarks are here. Why was a decentralized architecture for this network so fundamentally important, and thus why was Groove uniquely suited for the task? This brings me to the second reason that I'm tremendously pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to solving this problem. Larry Lessig taught us that in software-based systems in cyberspace, the code can define outcomes - inadvertently or intentionally - that might have an impact on society. Or better stated in this case, the system's core architectural design principles have a real impact not only on the system's mission effectiveness, but also in how it might effectively preserve and protect rights. To understand these issues more deeply, one need look no further than the eloquent work released this past December by the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, called "Creating a Trusted Network for Homeland Security". If you're interested in the "why" of decentralization, read the report. Look at the members of the task force. And take particular note of their proposed SHARE network and its architecture. (Interestingly, Richard Eckel wrote about it in his blog before he became aware of the details of Groove's involvement with HSIN.) Lots of stuff here to read, but it's truly fascinating if you are interested in understanding how decentralization and peer-to-peer technology is having a real impact on government and society. Although so, so many people are involved in this project because of its scope, in particular I'd like to recognize Col. Tom Marenic, Pat Duecy, Ed Manavian, and especially our partner Mike Kushin of ManTech/IDS. My sincere thanks for your leadership, your passion about the mission, and your appreciation for organizational dynamics, social dynamics, technology and architecture in assembling a large and empirically effective system for purposeful social interaction. 8:11:27 PM

Monday, December 08, 2003

A lazyweb request after reading this:  Someone should register the domain "phoneswap.org", and build a quick website (no - not a business) that does two things:  1) acts as a clearinghouse where you can post the phone/technology (and carrier if it's locked) that you have, and the carrier/technology that you're switching to, and 2) has a community-supported "how to" on helpful hints for swapping contacts - perhaps even technology-assisted.  If you just want to get rid of an unused phone or other device or pda, you could be offered the option instead to formally accumulate whuffie. 8:11:40 AM

Friday, November 14, 2003

640KB ought to be enough for anyone.  Last year about this time I had a big travel-related gap in blogging; this year it's the same.  I had few minutes today, so here's a stream-of-consciousness largely about WinFS, based on some recent conversations.  Fire away. 3:48:36 PM

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Clay and Ross point at articles from Gelernter and Hornik regarding the death of eMail.  I can't for the life of me imagine why this is a surprise to people.  There is NO possibility of sustainable constraints on email - a fundamentally unaccountable medium.  Are we surprised when we can't do productive work in an uncontrollable medium?  Are we going to whine and look for legal relief when in fact it is our own complacency that keeps us from embracing (or demanding) effective solutions for information workers? People who use Groove today, and people who used Notes in its early years (before most enterprises locked down the creation of databases), understand the personally-empowering feeling of doing work in "collaborative workspaces". What, you might ask, is the big deal?  It's actually quite simple: When you have a space (a workspace) online to do your work with others that truly feels more effective and more convenient than eMail, you start relying less and less on eMail for critical work processes.  In Groove, for example, once you start experiencing the swarming aspects of work within its workspaces, you're hooked.  And it stops bothering you that eMail is so incredibly broken. Anyone who is doing a critical business process online that involves substantial dialog between individuals should NOT be using email at this point in history, and many no longer are. Maybe you're doing joint design, joint development, customer support, developer support, supply chain exception handling, work with outside counsel on patents, business development work on a merger, preparation for a product launch, making a decision on product naming or pricing or packaging, working with others to open a new store in a new region, collaborating on an audit, working with others to nail a global account, doing joint selling with a partner, working with another agency on a criminal investigation, or just working with someone to review a contract or a presentation ... you name it.  If you're doing a critical process in e-mail now, you won't be doing it there for long. Think about it.  Think about the rate of increase of "noise" in email over the past two years, which is a very short time.  Think about where we'll be in as short as five years.  Can you imagine? Right now, every major enterprise has a "content-scanning gateway" that processes every incoming email, looking for Dangerous Stuff.  Many individuals do the same thing on their own computers.  Some enterprises are beginning to quarantine incoming email for extended periods - sometimes an hour or more.  Maybe you'll get too much junk, or maybe you won't get what you're supposed to get.  Maybe you'll get it, but it'll be too late.  It depends upon where they turn the knob on the software ... and it's insane. If you're hoping for some super-duper neo-PIM to or super-filter or super-law to come along to make your life easier, spare yourself the agony and just think ahead: it is NOT a sustainable solution if it is still called "eMail".  eMail is thirty years old, and we owe it a great debt of honor, but it has been pushed well beyond its design center and it's time to move on.  Incrementally, progressively, but most definitely. If you have work to do with others, online, try workspaces.  There are many different types - from Groove if you like client-based mobility, to SharePoint if you like using Websites.  No noise, no spam, tuned to save your time.  Of course, you can't give up on eMail, and likely never will.  As time goes on, though, you'll only visit eMail as a low-priority background task, much as you do when sorting through your physical mail at home.  You'd never do important work through your home mailbox, would you? Workspaces work. 8:45:01 PM

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Upcoming (via Many2Many) is interesting.  But it immediately causes the following questions to come to mind; I'm sure I must not be the first to ask such things: Has a method to embed iCal into XML ever been approved or agreed upon?  If so, let me refer to it as xCal. Has a method to embed xCal events/etc ever been suggested as a viable item type for RSS? Has anyone built websites that publish venues' event calendars in such a format for subscription/aggregation? Has anyone built an Outlook or Notes adapter that publishes personal or team calendars to such a feed, OR Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into a desktop or web calendar UI? Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into your Outlook or Notes personal calendar? Each fall, as I manually enter the entire Celtics season schedule, my company's holidays and my childrens' school calendars into my own personal calendar, I am again reminded how ridiculous it is that The Net has not yet ubiquitously embraced the everyday exchange of virtual objects so basic as calendars and as vCards - which can also likewise be subscribed-to, aggregated into Contact Lists and auto-updated via personal RSS feeds.  Bizarre. Update:  This is an interesting reply, and Dave points out (thank you) that there has indeed been work done in this area.  Also see: Marc, Russell, Jon. 2:53:39 PM

© Copyright 2004 Ray Ozzie. Last update: 3/23/2004; 2:41:32 PM.