By now, you've most likely seen the news that Microsoft is buying Groove Networks, and that Groove founder Ray Ozzie will become one of Microsoft's Chief Technical Officers (not, as reported in some other outlets, the CTO - there are others). I was an early and enthusiastic user of Groove, first reviewing it in an early issue of Developer Central clear back in 2002 (at which point I'd already been using it for a year or two). You'll note the past tense in that sentence, though: I gradually fell off the Groove bandwagon, and by the time Groove 3.0 came out last year I had reached the point of no longer having it installed on any of my computers. I think all of my erstwhile Groove collaborators had already dropped out of the network by that point.
There are a bunch of reasons why my own Groove usage declined to nothing, and I hope Microsoft can address them and resurrect the usefulness of this technology for me, because the notion of secure, seamless, background file sharing is a powerful one. (Yes, there's a lot more to the Groove platform than that - and I think that's part of the problem; all the other stuff that clutters up the interface seems to have distracted the company from their core strength). Here, in no particular order, is what went wrong with my Groove experience:
Despite these issues, I put up with Groove for years, until it got to the point where I literally couldn't do so: Groove 3.0 just wouldn't install on Windows Server 2003 for me, no matter what I tried, and at that point I was content to drop it and go on to other things. Windows Server 2003 isn't an officially supported platform for the client (some day I'll rant about how companies - including Microsoft - are missing a bet by not supporting this as a developer desktop configuration), but it had worked in previous releases.
But, guess what: I'm happy to see Microsoft buying Groove. It's been utterly no secret that this has been Groove's exit strategy for years, probably from the very beginning. They've been spending so much time and energy integrating with Office and SharePoint that they've had little time for anything else, and it's hard to avoid the suspicion that this has had costs in other areas. And I suspect Microsoft bought them for the core technology, not for the current Groove client. Reading the press releases, they say "The acquisition will add Groove's products to the lineup of Microsoft Office System products, servers and services," but I don't think that necessarily says that we'll see Microsoft Groove coming on an MSDN CD-ROM any time soon. My own bet, in fact, is that Groove-as-we-know-it is going to vanish entirely. Microsoft desperately needs to do something compelling with Office 12 to encourage people to upgrade from Office 97, 2000, XP, and 2003. One possible plan would be to build in serious collaboration capabilities, not dependent on a SharePoint server, by rolling Groove into the Office 12 box as the underlying collaborative technology. That might be enough to actually revive the franchise and justify whatever price Microsoft is paying to acquire the technology.
Someone stop by in a year or so to let me know if this speculation is anywhere near correct, OK?