[BusinessTeam] Commentary on groove p2p app

Message-ID: <6B75EF096AE0BE428B8CEDEA89C5F6327832EE@exchange01.lab49.com> · Mon Oct 30 15:11:35 2000 UTC

Is Groove the new Napster?
By:  <mailto:andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk> Andrew Orlowski in San
<mailto:andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk> Francisco
Posted: 29/10/2000 at 09:12 GMT

After three years of monastic silence, Lotus Notes' creator Ray Ozzie
unveiled his latest project Groove Networks in New York this week, and
instantly became a kind of godhead for the peer-to-peer networking buzz.

P2P, doncha know, is going to be the defining computing model for the next
ten years ... or so a very powerful and well-heeled portion of
self-interested CEOs, analysts and VCs (Esshhther!) will tell you.

So after the dust had settled, and the tech media played its: "I saw this
before you did!"/"Yeah, but I knew Ray before you did!" games, we had a
poke around.

If you don't read any further (and it only gets interesting there), then
take this away: Groove is indeed a very well-thought out reimplementation
of the best Lotus Notes ideas - for creating ad hoc collaborative
workgroups with some messaging prepackaged - only this time for the Web,
rather than the corporate LAN.

Like Notes, it's being promoted as a stealth product: as a client that
needs only some minimal overhead at the server (yes, Notes admins can stop
laughing now, but that's how Notes was originally sold, believe it or not)
which comes with a platform attached. But it fixes one of the features of
Notes, in making spontaneous workgroups, or work sessions, much easier to
arrange.

Get into the Groove
Groove taps into the same management zeitgeist that Notes tapped into, and
really it's a very good one. You'll know it pretty well, but the terms
decentralised organisation, dispersed knowledge, ad hoc workgroups, worker
empowerment, hive mind, downsizing(er... scrub the last one ...) were all
familiar ten years ago, and they're back again now.

Groove is a downloadable client (Windows only for now, but Linux to follow
with a wink in the direction of Mac OS X), a platform and an API. It
piggy-backs onto XML-RPC or the Microsoft-backed rival SOAP protocols and,
as a remarkably refreshed-looking Bill Gates pointed out in a video
testimony, it hooks into COM too. This must be the first public mention of
COM by a senior Microsoft executive in two years, and a fairly good
indication of how cocky the old guard is (Andy Groovem sorry Grove, also
leant a hand) is about P2P swinging the fashion back to fat clients.

However, despite the vested interests and the buzzword glue, you can't
fault Ozzie for lack of consistency, or for shying away from the tricky
technical challenges.

Groove focuses on packaging the really hard parts of such a framework:
synchronisation and security, just like he did in Notes. And if you doubt
that these are anything less than critical to the success of such a model,
then hark back to the winter of 1995, shortly after Netscape's launch,
when received wisdom had it that proprietary client/server groupware would
in short order be buried by whizzy, IETF-blessed patchworks of Internet
software.

Today, Notes has 60 million users, and Collabra (or your fill-in-the-blank
protocol-centric alternative) has considerably fewer. The fact is,
although Internet standards have taken us a long way, for a particular
kind of buyer, they don't go all the way unless they're wrapped up.

In fact at the launch one of the more ironic testimonies came from Viant's
CTO, citing "my friend John Perry Barlow" (a warning alarm bell went off
for us there) who proposed "the Net has eliminated containers...
containers are a side effect of technology".

Absolute garbage, of course, as Groove is nothing if not a container. It
is of course a very neat container which packages all of the tricky parts
of business processes that commodity internet protocols haven't quite got
licked.

There are a couple of interesting side effects which the P2P bandwagon
hasn't yet addressed. And it will need to if it's going to roll that much
further into the future.

Into the Groove

First, what parts of Groove will the company make free available as free
software if only as a bait to accelerate the platform?

Groove could adopt a model similar to Napster, where it it tolerates
software libre client clones while keeping other protocols under wraps.
But that would be a hard sell to business customers.

Second, Groove does not address trust metrics. For now it's an
infrastructure play that leaves aside how people collaborate.

These days it is a lot harder than in the early days of Notes to chooses
likely collaborative partners when creating ad hoc groups as there is much
more information media to choose from. Who's smart, and who's a clown?
Working this out should be transparent, and the science is evolving pretty
rapidly. Whether Groove intends to swallow such trust metric logic into
the platform, or leave it for third parties, will be its next test.

And finally, and this is a question to which all P2P brainstormers should
have a some kind of answer, is whether you'll really be able trust the
data you're working with.

Sun's chief scientist John Gage told us back in June that he thought one
of the biggest headaches in computing in fifty years would be
disappearance of the canonical text. He didn't just mean bit-flipping, as
any regular Napster user will confirm.

Faced with several dozen versions of Heartbreak Hotel, many of different
lengths, recorded at different bitrates, how do you know which version is
the definitive recording? Which one drops the start, and adds dead space
at the end? At least the central server model ought to guarantee some
redundancy. The redundancy in the Napster model is really a redundancy of
incompleteness.

These questions alone should be enough to sober up the quite frantic P2P
hype - at least a little. For now though, Groove appears to have made an
excellent debut, particularly in making its developer material available
and friendly. ®

Luke Flemmer
VP Strategic Ventures
nano
phone: (212) 402-7870
fax:      (212) 430-6374
www.nano.com <http://www.nano.com/>