Groove Networks

» see groove.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Groove was the kind of software bought by defense contractors and disaster-response teams. I was a university student in Ankara when it shipped, and nothing in my life required an encrypted shared workspace that kept working after the network went away.

Ray Ozzie founded the company in 1997, in Beverly, Massachusetts, with the strongest possible resume for the job. He had written Lotus Notes, the product that taught corporate America what groupware meant, and he had spent the years afterward watching people fight the thing Notes required: a server, somewhere, owned by somebody, that both sides of a conversation had to be allowed to reach.

Groove's answer was to delete the server. A workspace was a folder that existed in full on every member's machine, encrypted at rest and in transit, syncing directly between peers whenever any two of them happened to be reachable. You could work on a plane and land and have it reconcile. You could invite somebody at another company without anyone's IT department granting anybody an account. For a US Navy unit on a bad satellite link, or a relief team in a flooded city, this was not a convenience feature but the entire reason to buy it.

Microsoft had invested $51 million in the company in October 2001, which is the kind of number that makes the ending predictable. On 10 March 2005 it bought the rest, reportedly for around $120 million. Ozzie became chief technical officer under Bill Gates and then chief software architect after him, which was always the point. Nearly 200 employees came along with him.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The reviews were reverent and the sales were not. Groove Virtual Office asked you to install a fairly heavy Windows client, understand what a shared space was, and get everyone you worked with to do the same. What most teams wanted was somewhere to put a document so that the other person could open it, and by 2005 there were cheaper ways to want that.

Where it did work, it worked because of the constraint nobody else was designing for. Government and military buyers had a real problem with connectivity that came and went, and a real problem with letting outside organizations inside the perimeter. Groove solved both by never assuming either. That is also what made it a niche product, and a niche product with a founder that famous is an acquisition target rather than a company.

~ what it became ~

Microsoft shipped it as Office Groove 2007 in the Ultimate and Enterprise editions in January 2007. In July 2010 it was renamed SharePoint Workspace and repositioned as the offline client for SharePoint, which is to say the server came back and the peer-to-peer part was now a caching layer. When Office 2013 arrived the product was simply not in the box, and the answer to any question about it was OneDrive for Business.

So there are three dates you could put on this grave. The company died on 10 March 2005. The idea died in July 2010 when the workspace stopped being the thing and started being a copy of the thing. The name lasted until 2013. This grave means the company, because that is when the product stopped being able to decide what it was.

~ what got buried with it ~

The odd part of the inheritance is that the sync engine outlived every product name attached to it. The technology moved into what became OneDrive, so the file-syncing that hundreds of millions of people now do without thinking about it is descended from a tool built for teams who could not count on a network at all.

The other inheritance is the man. Ozzie ran Microsoft's software architecture from 2006 to 2010, wrote the internal memo that pushed the company toward services, and Azure came out the other end of that. Microsoft paid roughly $120 million for a collaboration product it eventually deleted, and got its cloud strategy in the same transaction.

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