Microsoft buys Groove Networks; Ray Ozzie becomes MS CTO!
The announcement today may not be a huge surprise to some people, but I'm certainly glad that this deal has finally happened because I've been hoping that it would ever since I first used Groove for team collaboration a few years ago. The main concern I had back then was that Groove was just focused on P2P (which was a very hot buzzword – still is -- due to the Napster phenomenon). I worried that they would face an uphill battle in selling to large enterprises, which have a very strong preference for centralized management of IT solutions. And looking at their customer list, which is heavily skewed towards small and medium size enterprises, I’d say that I was right. Fortunately, Groove now has a line of server products that are geared towards addressing the needs and concerns of large enterprises.
I’m most excited about Ray Ozzie becoming a CTO (along with Craig Mundie and David Vaskevitch reporting directly to Bill Gates. Ray is a living legend in the collaboration space and will likely help make Microsoft’s information worker products even better. Lastly, I’m anxious to see Ray start posting on his blog again soon.
