First read Zaplet vs. Groove (source: Scripting News). Now, keep in mind that Ray Ozzie is a really smart guy. He made Notes and later sold it for millions. Now he has Groove, which is supposed to be the Next Big Thing ™. I had the opportunity to meet Ray Ozzie last fall at a developer’s conference; I spoke with him briefly, and I can attest to the fact that he really believes that Groove is going to change the world. Well, it’s not. Groove is an overkill solution in search of a problem.
Ray poses several hypothetical questions in this latest article. Since I will probably not be speaking with him again, here are my not-so-hypothetical answers:
Ozzie: For example, who hasn’t been frustrated when trying to carry on a structured or highly interactive, back-and-forth conversation by e-mail, with layers and layers of > > >’s, when a simple structured conversation tool would have been better?
I do this all the time. It’s not an ideal medium, but it lends itself to well-thought-out answers because of the inherent time lag between responses. For more interactive conversations, I use instant messaging programs. Currently, I use Yahoo Instant Messenger because it’s clean, simple, elegant, stays out of my way until I need it, and lets me save conversations to a text file. By contrast, Groove is big, slow, takes up my whole screen by default, sucks up memory at a staggering rate (I’ve caught it using over 75 MB of memory just sitting there doing nothing — that’s more than Oracle!), and has no export features.
Oh, and YIM flashes the menu bar if I receive a new message while it’s in the background. Groove gives no indication of new messages; it assumes I have no other work to do and will be keeping Groove in the foreground for the length of my conversation. So Groove’s interface is both inadequate and overkill — an impressive feat, but I wouldn’t rush to put it on my resume.
Ozzie: Or who hasn’t carried out a highly sensitive conversation over inherently insecure [Internet] voice or e-mail or instant messaging?
I do this all the time, both over e-mail and over instant messaging. If people cared one single whit that the Internet was insecure, they would demand encryption and it would be standard and seamless in both e-mail and instant messaging. But they don’t, so it’s not. (They did care about protecting their credit card information, so we tacked SSL onto the browser. Of course, it turns out that the real problem is not protecting information as it’s going over the wire, but protecting it once it’s sitting on some Big Company’s server. But I digress.) Groove’s built-in encryption is overkill; it solves a problem nobody has.
Ozzie: The server-based model is fundamentally a non-starter in today’s business environment. A fundamentally decentralized business environment must be supported by fundamentally decentralized computing and communications technology.
All right, it’s not really phrased as a question, but it deserves a response anyway. Today’s business environment (whatever that means) does not care about server-based vs. client-based vs. moon-based vs. Earth-based. That pendulum swings back and forth every few years anyway. (Mainframes! No, PCs! No, thin clients! No, peer-to-peer!) Today’s business environment (wow, I really detest that phrase already) cares about supporting hetergeneous networks.
Groove designed their proprietary, patent-protected, Windows-only, COM-based, Microsoft-centric architecture in 1997. In their defense, this was not a stupid move at the time; the world looked a lot different in 1997. Windows 95 had taken the place of Windows 3.1, Windows 98 was just around the corner, the desktop was king, and the king of the desktop was Microsoft. Unfortunately, it took them 3 years to implement it, and while they weren’t looking, the world changed without them. Today, you can’t assume every participant in the conversation is running a Windows PC at 500 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. Some are running Macs, Linux, Palm Pilots, network PCs, Internet appliances, or nothing but a cell phone and someone on the other end reading people’s words as they type.
Hetergeneous networks require a lowest-common-denominator approach to conversation-enabling tools. By contrast, Groove is a Grand System, built by Grand System Builders who are convinced that the world would be a better place, if only everyone would put down all their piddly little tools and install this Grand System. I saw a wonderful quote on Slashdot once: “There are two kinds of large software systems: those that evolved from small systems and those that don’t work.” Groove doesn’t work.
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