Well, another week, another interesting deal to discuss. Two weeks ago it was IBM partnering with Zend, this week it’s Microsoft snapping up Groove. The deal has any number of interesting angles to it: P2P and Microsoft, Ray Ozzie as Microsoft CTO, proliferation of Office assets – so I can’t go into detail on all of them. But I’ll try the same format from the IBM/Zend post mostly because it’s quickest.
Q: Ok, leading things off, why?
A: Well, it’s not as much of a surprise as it may have seemed to some. Groove and Microsoft have been tight for a long while, and as IBM has proven time and time again, tight partners can make good acquisitions. And although my own experiences with Groove have been checkered at best – I’ve always found it to be very demanding hardware-wise, and I deemed it unsuitable for our needs when we started RedMonk – the product has its fans. Not volumes of them, but the customer base and the technology was enough that Microsoft saw fit to invest in them twice, then acquire them.
Q: Well, that’s the Groove-centric explanation – what about the other half of the equation?
A: Ah, that’s the $25,000 question, isn’t it? What were the drivers from the Microsoft side? What did Microsoft feel it was missing from a product perspective? How does this augment their collaboration strategy? The answer to all three questions, as best I can put it, is vision. Make no mistake, Microsoft’s got a lot of solid product assets in the collaboration space, but it’s difficult to look at their offerings and understand what the larger game plan is going forward. Where does collaboration occur, for example? Exchange? Sharepoint? Office? LCS? Here’s how Paul De Groot from Directions on Microsoft put it to News.com:
“To some extent, Microsoft has had a shotgun approach to collaboration,” DeGroot said. “It’s not clear to me which of Microsoft’s approaches to collaboration will be a winner.”
Groove doesn’t answer these questions, but its vision of an individual workspace that can be connected in an ad hoc fashion to remote and frequently disconnected users is at least explainable in a sentence or two. In the short term, expect Groove to add complexity to the product portfolio; in the long term, expect some coalescence of the product portfolio. And beyond the technology there’s Ozzie himself.
Q: Precisely. Gates was near gushing when he described Ozzie’s contributions to Windows and Collaboration on this morning’s call (thanks Steve Gillmor for getting me the replay info) – what do you see him bringing to the table?
A: Well, his Lotus heritage is certainly an interesting wrinkle, but I’d venture to guess that Ray’s being counted on for at least two things: decentralized architecture expertise and vision.
One of my first thoughts when I heard the news was how the P2P or serverless approach championed by Groove would mesh with Microsoft’s strongly client/server oriented collaboration assets. The jury’s still out as far how Microsoft plans on reconciling that divide – they provided very few specifics today – but Ozzie did specifically state that differing demands from Information Workers (Ozzie’s quick to pick up the Microsoft jargon) introduced requirements that spanned centralized and decentralized architectures. I think the politics of this will be fascinating to watch, but it could be a real boon for Microsoft as they’d be able to offer flexible approaches depending on need.
On the vision point, I’d expect one of Ozzie’s major To Do’s to be determining how Microsoft takes their virtual stable of collaboration related assets and compresses them into a cohesive and digestible roadmap for clients. They didn’t hire him, after all, as a product manager heading his old product line. Instead, he’s been installed as the third Microsoft CTO – a direct report to Gates. As Ed Brill from Lotus/IBM put it, “Ray brings immediate credibility to the job, and I look forward to seeing his impact on Microsoft overall.”
Q: What does this mean for competitors like IBM or Novell?
A: In the short term, it will likely prove to be an excellent opportunity for FUD. As mentioned, Microsoft’s current collaboration arsenal and roadmap was already somewhat fragmented; introducing a major new product line – particularly one with a very distinct architectural approach – is liable to offer opportunities for competitive messaging.
Longer term, it’s possible that Ozzie and Groove manage to focus the collaboration efforts coming out of Redmond, and that could spell trouble for products that had been making headway against Exchange and other Microsoft offerings.
Q: Any other thoughts on the deal?
A: Several, but I’ll leave you with this one: is Microsoft trying with this deal to out-Lotus Lotus? Just yesterday I was speaking with a Linux messaging vendor and some AR folks, and one of folks on the call commented that they’d been at Lotus when Exchange really took off. The reason? Exchange was simpler, less complex. Since those days Microsoft’s offerings have grown steadily more complex, and – I’d argue – less easily sold and implemented. Everyone knows by now that I’m following the Hula project with great interest, primarily because its vision is simple: messaging and calendar, that’s it. On the spectrum of collaboration tools’ complexity, you have Hula at one end and Lotus at the other. Both have credible markets, and Microsoft made its mark closer to the Hula end of the spectrum than the Lotus. It’s been clear for some time – and today’s news merely cements this – that Microsoft wants to be perceived as more Lotus than Hula. What impact that will have remains to be seen.
