I heard Microsoft is hiring Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes. I was too young at that time and for me Lotus Notes sounds like an alternative to Thunderbird, Outlook and Evolution. Well, a bad alternative since no one I know uses it.
But Ray O. also sold his business, Groove Virtual Office, to Microsoft. I watched for a while the funny Flash video and I didn’t understood where does it fit compared to Microsoft’s Project.
I had participated in lots of collaborative media, such as Wikipedia, Slashdot, Rent-a-Coder, Mozilla’s Bugzilla, Sourceforge’s CVS and ASF SVN repositories, but when I see these kind of labels, such as colaborator, slave, commander-in-chief, as in Groove or Microsoft software, I get a bit nervous. It is my opinion that a organization is more efficient when there are a small number of layers of authority.
…And when I large corp (say, GM) decides it needs more levels, it will never use such software.
I have another supposition about what lured Microsoft into this deal. There is this fancy button in Windows Explorer provided by Groove. You click on it and it synchronizes with other people’s copies of the folder. As far as I could see there was no versioning, but, my God, that was hard to implement and Microsoft needed to buy this company because they didn’t have the know-how required. And I see from their presentation that "PC or Web-based file sharing" is "charging you by the month or by the megabyte". Maybe Groove found the secret recipe to an internet connection without monthly fee, or maybe they are hiding the fact that if you would only synch docs you won’t have such a big traffic and you might host a small web server with DAV.
The monthly fee won’t be going anywhere, but Ray O. will. He is going to Microsoft.
PS. I would like to add that the basic options are available in a Personal Edition without a fee, and that’s almost as good as you can get for free from LogMeIn.com. Give it a try until Microsoft changes the application server from ColdFusion to ASP and from free version to "checking your Windows XP license, please wait forever".