Microsoft in the Groove
p2pnet.net News:- Let’s Get that GDN+Groove Thang ON!
That’s the header to a post from Korby Parnell on a (the?) Microsoft blog site and it goes on:
"Sweet, sweet music to my ears! Microsoft has purchased Groove Networks and appointed its founder, Ray Ozzie, as our new Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
"Groove is social computing.
“In 2002, when I was working on the Visual Studio Core IDE, my good friend Jonathan, who’s now living the dream as a User Experience Architect at another company, flew into my office and said, "DUDE, have you seen Groove?" It was a typical question and a time-honored ritual commenced.
“"Dude," I said, returning my eyes to my monitor, ‘not yet but I should, huh?’ ‘Oh yeah," he replied, ‘It rocks!’ As my browser loaded, I typed ‘w-w-w.g-r-o-o-v-e’, ‘.net’, Jonathan prompted me, as he circled my desk and drew up a chair beside me like the creative director of Boogie Monster, Inc. He leaned into my monitor and said, ‘There!’ stabbing at the screen, click on ‘Try Workspaces.’ Minutes later we were taking turns at the whiteboard, adapting Groove Workspaces concepts to the Visual Studio Core IDE, a crucial part of which Jonathan owned: community. Jonathan and I test drove Workspaces in tandem for a year and continued to do so even after he left the team for greener pastures.”
Dollar Bill Gates (recently proclaimed the world’s richest man) and Groove’s Ozzie certainly make an interesting couple.
But p2p could be a problem, it seems.
“Groove’s focus on using peer-to-peer communications for workgroup collaboration, for example, could clash with Microsoft Corp.’s Office products and culture, analysts said,” states eWeek.
“This is happening about a year too late," Nate Root, a vp at Forrester Research is quoted as saying.
"They should have done this a year ago so they could really plug Groove well into the Windows Longhorn and Office 12 development roadmaps. Now is not the time when these product teams want to hear, ‘Hey, can we throw this in there too?’ Root said.”
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See:-
world’s richest man – Forbes annual billionaires list, p2pnet, March 11, 22005
interesting combination – Microsoft and Groove Networks, p2pnet, March 10, 2005
eWeek – Analysts Approve Microsoft-Groove Union, March 11, 2005
March 14th, 2005 at 8:48 pm
If they do go forward with this, it would make things nice for the End User that really doesn’t understand what p2p is or know much about computers.
I see it like this. With this program (that unless I missed something) functions like a modified bit torrent client. For example, if you’re in a corporation environment and have a training video everyone in 700 nation wide locations has to see about a new policy and they have to see it by tomorrow you can drop the video into a group folder and it’s torrented out in the same multi-source transfer method used by bit torrent.
Outstanding use of the bit torrent p2p structure and an undeniable focal point showing the legitimate and positive possibilities with the technology that the RIAA/MPAA type’s have all but trivialized and wrote off to that being a small segment of it’s use…. but really, has anyone tracked how many companies are growing dependant on said technology? Nobody that I’ve seen has done such a review though I know that instant messengers and p2p clients are used for business purposes every day in companies where I’ve been before.
Anyway, while I’m concerned that it’s M$oft that’s taking the forefront on adding this kind of service into their OS instead of it being an outside company – it may make the use of said p2p lean more on the side of legality….
Time will tell.
_-Jile-_