Person-to-Person
Person-to-Person
I search based on how I remember things.
Knowledge repositories need to have integrated knowledge reasoning engines. They need to be able to infer new relationships and knowledge.
Ability to create secure, easy-to-find places where I can store any and all types of information related to a particular personal, work or shared topic.
Ability to share things as easily as I share a conversation or invite someone to lunch.
Need the correct software to be there when I need it.
Need the software to automatically be running when it needs to be running.
Applications need to be easily composable with one another.
From: http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_16/b3929095_mz063.htm
Gates: "IBM Isn't Doing That Much"
Microsoft's chairman says when it comes to productivity software, his company "has to push the frontiers on our own"
There are few markets Microsoft (MSFT ) is pouring more resources into than collaboration software. In 2003, it spent $202 million buying PlaceWare, the No. 2 Web-conferencing company behind WebEx Communications (WEBX ). In March, it agreed to pay $120 million for Groove Networks, a company that developed a technology to make it easy for workers at different companies to collaborate on projects through corporate firewalls. And it's pouring millions more into research and development to come up with new ways to enable workers to communicate using their PCs. Advertisement
All those efforts put Microsoft on a collision course with longtime foe IBM (IBM ). While Redmond has eroded Big Blue's share of the corporate e-mail market, it had watched as IBM jumped into the markets for secure instant messaging, Web conferencing, and shared document workspaces.
No more. Microsoft has plowed into those markets, and it's working quickly to leverage Office, its monopoly desktop-productivity suite, to gain share. Chairman William H. Gates III recently sat down with BusinessWeek Seattle Bureau Chief Jay Greene to talk about his company's stepped-up collaboration software efforts and its latest battle with archrival IBM. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Q: Microsoft has made some acquisitions in the collaboration software business and built some of its own technology. IBM is developing some interesting technology, too. How do you see the competition between the two companies evolving?
A: Well, frankly, IBM isn't doing that much. You can go track. The only product they have left that relates to information workers is [Lotus] Notes. And you can go and get the data from the analysts of how they've lost market share with Notes.
Q: What about their new Workplace product?
A: Well, when people want to look at business information, as far as I know, people use Excel to navigate business information. When people want to be notified about things and organize their communications, it's the Microsoft e-mail client. Outlook and Outlook Express are the primary tools people are using there.
IBM made a serious try with OfficeVision and the Lotus stuff. And maybe they'll introduce a new word processor. Who knows? But in terms of sitting down and thinking about office workers -- how do they spend time, is it in meetings, how should they deal with their priorities -- that's integrated into Outlook because that's where you want to see these new things happen.
We do major improvements to Office every two-and-a-half years or so, and the most important one we'll do is the one that comes out next year. It's based on this idea of collaboration. And the Groove technology -- which we'll offer right now but we'll do deep integration [into Office] -- is part of that next big wave.
Q: Groove is a tiny company with $20 million in annual sales. Is this acquisition really more about getting Groove founder Ray Ozzie in-house, or is it about the technology?
A: Well, fortunately, we get both and they're not that really separable. Ray has built a team that has a vision of how to make people more effective. We're going to incorporate that in to the overall Office picture.
Ray will make very broad contributions because he can tell us how we should improve the Windows platform to help Office. And so you can kind of think of Ray as almost having three roles: He's going to make sure this Groove technology evolves to fulfill his vision of that. He's going to help Office think about collaboration in a more advanced way. And then he's going to make sure our Windows platform work allows him to fulfill the scenarios that he has in mind.
Q: Revenue in the Information Worker group at Microsoft, of which Office is a part, is growing only in the single digits right now. Do you think collaboration software could eventually get the group back into double-digit revenue growth again?
A: Well, the Office business is one of the most incredible businesses there is, measured by the positive impact it has on worker productivity, measured by how innovative that group is, measured by how profitable that group is, measured by how it helps drive the Microsoft platform. Office is an unbelievable thing.
We have to convince people, to have any revenue at all, that the new version is exciting to them. You don't rent Office, you license it, and then you can just sit on it. We've done a series of ads with these guys with these dinosaur heads on saying, "Hey, we've got Office 97. What's wrong with us? We're so inefficient. Jeez." So that's a fairly helpful message to let people know they should get the latest and greatest.
So I'm not the one to make financial predictions, but Office will innovate in areas like business intelligence, collaboration, connection to telephony. Collaboration is one of the big areas of innovation. And the big numbers come when you make it so Office workers have to go to 5% fewer meetings because they're using the SharePoint (a document-sharing application). Or they're using Live Meeting (a Web-conferencing service), so they don't have to take the trip. Or they're connecting up to a partner in a secure way when they would have had to use paper to do that.
And so only by really surprising people with these new productivity applications do we deliver something where the licensing price is a tiny fraction of the productivity benefit that they get out of it.
Q: What are the big areas of innovations or the next big breakthroughs?
A: Well, the collaboration workflow is certainly number one. The connection to real-time communications -- telephony, videoconferencing, audioconferencing -- that's a huge one. Business intelligence is an absolutely huge one.
Q: And how much are you investing in R&D specific to collaboration technology?
A: It's complicated because you have to be very careful how you define these things. Take security: In SharePoint, there are huge enhancements to security. But is that in security, or is that in collaboration?
There's no doubt that Office, after Windows, is the most amazing software business that there has ever been on the planet. And it has had more to do with worker productivity than any piece of software ever has. You could certainly say that within Office, collaboration broadly defined is the top area of R&D investment.
Q: Earlier, you were somewhat dismissive about IBM's ability in this business. Do you think IBM will not be a significant competitor in the collaboration software market for you guys?
A: I think IBM's success in the productivity software business will stay the same that it has been. Do you know anybody using DisplayWrite, OfficeVision, or 1-2-3? What they have is they have a bunch of individual products that they put under an umbrella. WebSphere is an umbrella name. Workspace is an umbrella name.
They are IBM. So you always have to take them seriously, just like we took OfficeVision seriously and their acquisition of Lotus seriously. The only thing really left from Lotus at this point is the Notes piece. And you can look at what has happened with the share of that. They're not even defending what they've had very well at this point. But it just sort of shows in the area of productivity, Microsoft has to push the frontiers on our own. That's the business model that we live in. All we get to sell is our innovation. We don't get to sell the existing strength that we have. It's just the new breakthrough stuff. And hence, you need brilliant people like Ray and his team to drive that forward, full speed.
I'm working this morning with my feet on the coffee table with my laptop on top of my lap. Occasionally, I look over the top of my laptop screen to look at the TV and catch what's happening on CNN.
On http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2005/03/15/396059.aspx blog I found a link to the video broadcast to Billg's LCS 2005 launch keynote talk. I click on the link and Windows Media starts in the usual way.
Everything is cool except I want to go back to working on email in Outlook. But I would really like to do is project the Billg video onto my TV so that I can similarly watch it occasionally and catch the more interesting PPT slides while working in Outlook.
This is a scenario that is be valuable to me and presumably others. It's also interesting to find scenearios that span multiple MS business divisions.
Cheers,
Michael.
Ref: http://news.zdnet.com/Ex-Groove+exec+loses+initial+bid+to+nix+Microsoft+deal/2100-3513_22-5650797.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn
No need to read too deeply into this quotation...
"We look forward to adding Groove technologies to the line-up of Microsoft Office system servers, applications and services following the close of the acquisition."
From: http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2005/03/28/daily60.html
Microsoft's $120M Groove buyout challenged in suit
Boston Business Journal
Microsoft Corp.'s $120 million cash offer to buy Groove Networks Inc., owned by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, ignores some employees who hold preferred and common stock, a former Groove worker said in a lawsuit, Bloomberg Business News reported.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced it would acquire Beverly-based Groove and hire Ozzie as chief technical officer, according to a March 1 statement. He would report to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Former Groove employee Michael Matthews claimed Microsoft and Ozzie, who together hold 59 percent of Groove's stock, "seek to eliminate the interest of junior preferred and common stockholders for no consideration" in the $120 million deal, according to a lawsuit filed March 25 in Delaware Chancery Court.
The lawsuit could temporarily block the deal. Microsoft, the world's largest maker of software, wants to use Groove products to supplement its Office business applications. The combination will help computer users in different locations work on documents together over the Internet, Microsoft said.
Matthews sued closely-held Groove and its directors, including Ozzie. He asked Judge William B. Chandler III to stop the buyout under the present terms and award damages and legal fees. Groove lawyers asked Chandler to keep details of the transaction confidential, but he denied the request.
The suit claims the buyout is also unfair because insiders will get $50 million in "golden parachute" payments and other benefits, including $27 million in stock grants for Ozzie.
Although a somewhat dated article (fall of 2003), the following eWeek article is an interesting read especially given the events of the last week: http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/0,2533,a=112092,00.asp.
Cheers,
Michael.
First, for many people, this is a huge suprise. Many people thought the infatuation between MS and Groove had come and past. So what happened?
I've been tracking the investment inflows and outflow into Groove since they first announced Groove 1.0 and have always felt their greatest challenge was to become cashflow positive while trying to market and sell a powerful but very inexpensive rich client software product.
Lets say it takes more than $30 million to sustain a software company of ~250 people. ...and $40 million to have a vibrant software product organization of this size from an overall development, marketing and sales perspective. To gross $40 million per year, close to 300K end-user licenses have be sold annually at Groove's price points. Pretty tough.
My guess is the clay at the bottom of the cookie jar was starting to show and MS was the logical choice given they already owned 25%.
This is pure (but calculated) speculation on my part but probably pretty close to the cup. I hope the average Groove employee was able to benefit after creating such a great product.
Cheers,
Michael.
1. A reasoning or inference engine fully integrated into the WinFS stack ...ideally shipped with WinFS so that ISVs would have easy access to it. MS Access would be an ideal application for providing an end-user experience for creating applications that can reason of the rich knowledge networks that can be represented in WinFS.
See http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2003/11/11/3435.aspx.
2. Ability to search for PowerPoints with green backgrounds and pictures with shiny red metal and blonde hair.
See http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2005/02/26/56783.aspx.
3. An easy-to-use and configure shared space experience for plain old Windows users.
See http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2004/02/14/7232.aspx.
An interesting observation.... Checkout one of my old blog postings about WinFS @ http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2003/11/21/3826.aspx.
Notice all of the blog SPAM about “texas hold'em” in the comments ....then note which Google ads appear at the bottom of the page ...an interesting dynamic.
Cheers,
Michael.
ArgumentException
The SqlParameter with ParameterName '@ItemCount' is already contained by another SqlParameterCollection.
I've received this error twice now ...once while posting a new article to my blog and a second time as I clicked from my Admin page to my blog's public view.
This error hasn't happened for quite a while now.
Checkout http://www.innovationfutures.com/bk/guide.html.
For example, do you think the price of RFID chips will drop below 25 cents by the end of 2004?
> >> encourage you to not think of WinFS as a file system <<
>
> That's true, but you've gotta admit that (WinFS == "Windows File System")
> or
> (WinFS.IsA("Windows File System") == true)
> are hard equalities to ignore.
>
> Carl
At this point in time, a technology name is just name.
How about:
."Windows Future Storage"
...or "Windows with Fantastic Schema"
...or "Wicked Fact Store"
...or "Windows with Fun Synchronization"
...or "William Finds a Savior"
(Any presenter (from any team) who uses the last bullet in a PPT (14 pt or greater) in a BillG review gets a free dinner at the Metropolitan.)
Cheers,
Michael.
Re: Corporate blogging is *not* like water cooler conversation
World-wide there must be a truly enourmous amount of traditional graffiti being created each day.
Any idea on how to estimate if more traditional graffiti is created world-wide vs. the number of blog entries posted world-wide in an average day?
IFRAMEs are a key graffiti enabling technology.
p.s. As an illustration that blogging is just a high-tech variant of traditional graffiti, I, for example, have no way of knowing if anyone actually has an answer to wrt why .Text/dotnetjunkies.com no longer supports IFRAME tags (unless they email me).
[Updated links - 05/04/19]
In http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/02/15.html#a6526, Scoble is overplaying the analogy of corporate blogging and water cooler conversation.
The interaction is nothing like water cooler conversation. Blogging is inherently [some people were skipping over this word so I came back with my thick black marker... now was it stall #1 or stall #2?] neither two-way nor conversational. Rather blogging is a high-tech version of bathroom grafitti that enables a person to:
a) scan (and optionally read) thousands of cubicle walls with little or no effort, and
b) during a moment of contemplation, add a few new scribbles to their own stall wall
Nothing more. Try adding proper tool support like NewsGator to your Outlook environment and the different shades of blogging begin to look the same: blog posts, Internet newsgroup articles, distribution list emails, etc. A person scan, filter, search and read them without any need to differentiate between them.
For those that have been around long enough, blogging is another instance of the “technology wheel of reincarnation”.
This posting has reached the bottom of this cubicle wall. Cheers ;-)
p.s. I usually like to add some graphics when I graffiti but this was a quick pit stop. Enough ... :-)
p.p.s. Of course, you can always come back and add graphics later.