Re: [BusinessTeam] Commentary on groove p2p app

Message-ID: <6B75EF096AE0BE428B8CEDEA89C5F6327832F3@exchange01.lab49.com> · Mon Oct 30 18:51:58 2000 UTC

The fact that Bill Gates actually gave a mention to Groove is interesting.

I met John Perry Barlow.  He's a fucking weird fellow.

I had a fever this morning, so I missed my flight.  I'll take one later
tonight.

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Luke Flemmer wrote:

LF:Is Groove the new Napster?
LF:By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
LF:Posted: 29/10/2000 at 09:12 GMT
LF:
LF:
LF:After three years of monastic silence, Lotus Notes' creator Ray Ozzie
LF:unveiled his latest project Groove Networks in New York this week, and
LF:instantly became a kind of godhead for the peer-to-peer networking
buzz.
LF:
LF:P2P, doncha know, is going to be the defining computing model for the
next
LF:ten years ... or so a very powerful and well-heeled portion of
LF:self-interested CEOs, analysts and VCs (Esshhther!) will tell you.
LF:
LF:So after the dust had settled, and the tech media played its: "I saw
this
LF:before you did!"/"Yeah, but I knew Ray before you did!" games, we had a
poke
LF:around.
LF:
LF:If you don't read any further (and it only gets interesting there),
then
LF:take this away: Groove is indeed a very well-thought out
reimplementation of
LF:the best Lotus Notes ideas - for creating ad hoc collaborative
workgroups
LF:with some messaging prepackaged - only this time for the Web, rather
than
LF:the corporate LAN.
LF:
LF:Like Notes, it's being promoted as a stealth product: as a client that
needs
LF:only some minimal overhead at the server (yes, Notes admins can stop
LF:laughing now, but that's how Notes was originally sold, believe it or
not)
LF:which comes with a platform attached. But it fixes one of the features
of
LF:Notes, in making spontaneous workgroups, or work sessions, much easier
to
LF:arrange.
LF:
LF:Get into the Groove
LF:Groove taps into the same management zeitgeist that Notes tapped into,
and
LF:really it's a very good one. You'll know it pretty well, but the terms
LF:decentralised organisation, dispersed knowledge, ad hoc workgroups,
worker
LF:empowerment, hive mind, downsizing(er... scrub the last one ...) were
all
LF:familiar ten years ago, and they're back again now.
LF:
LF:Groove is a downloadable client (Windows only for now, but Linux to
follow
LF:with a wink in the direction of Mac OS X), a platform and an API. It
LF:piggy-backs onto XML-RPC or the Microsoft-backed rival SOAP protocols
and,
LF:as a remarkably refreshed-looking Bill Gates pointed out in a video
LF:testimony, it hooks into COM too. This must be the first public mention
of
LF:COM by a senior Microsoft executive in two years, and a fairly good
LF:indication of how cocky the old guard is (Andy Groovem sorry Grove,
also
LF:leant a hand) is about P2P swinging the fashion back to fat clients.
LF:
LF:However, despite the vested interests and the buzzword glue, you can't
fault
LF:Ozzie for lack of consistency, or for shying away from the tricky
technical
LF:challenges.
LF:
LF:Groove focuses on packaging the really hard parts of such a framework:
LF:synchronisation and security, just like he did in Notes. And if you
doubt
LF:that these are anything less than critical to the success of such a
model,
LF:then hark back to the winter of 1995, shortly after Netscape's launch,
when
LF:received wisdom had it that proprietary client/server groupware would
in
LF:short order be buried by whizzy, IETF-blessed patchworks of Internet
LF:software.
LF:
LF:Today, Notes has 60 million users, and Collabra (or your
fill-in-the-blank
LF:protocol-centric alternative) has considerably fewer. The fact is,
although
LF:Internet standards have taken us a long way, for a particular kind of
buyer,
LF:they don't go all the way unless they're wrapped up.
LF:
LF:In fact at the launch one of the more ironic testimonies came from
Viant's
LF:CTO, citing "my friend John Perry Barlow" (a warning alarm bell went
off for
LF:us there) who proposed "the Net has eliminated containers... containers
are
LF:a side effect of technology".
LF:
LF:Absolute garbage, of course, as Groove is nothing if not a container.
It is
LF:of course a very neat container which packages all of the tricky parts
of
LF:business processes that commodity internet protocols haven't quite got
LF:licked.
LF:
LF:There are a couple of interesting side effects which the P2P bandwagon
LF:hasn't yet addressed. And it will need to if it's going to roll that
much
LF:further into the future.
LF:
LF:
LF:Into the Groove
LF:
LF:First, what parts of Groove will the company make free available as
free
LF:software if only as a bait to accelerate the platform?
LF:
LF:Groove could adopt a model similar to Napster, where it it tolerates
LF:software libre client clones while keeping other protocols under wraps.
But
LF:that would be a hard sell to business customers.
LF:
LF:Second, Groove does not address trust metrics. For now it's an
LF:infrastructure play that leaves aside how people collaborate.
LF:
LF:These days it is a lot harder than in the early days of Notes to
chooses
LF:likely collaborative partners when creating ad hoc groups as there is
much
LF:more information media to choose from. Who's smart, and who's a clown?
LF:Working this out should be transparent, and the science is evolving
pretty
LF:rapidly. Whether Groove intends to swallow such trust metric logic into
the
LF:platform, or leave it for third parties, will be its next test.
LF:
LF:And finally, and this is a question to which all P2P brainstormers
should
LF:have a some kind of answer, is whether you'll really be able trust the
data
LF:you're working with.
LF:
LF:Sun's chief scientist John Gage told us back in June that he thought
one of
LF:the biggest headaches in computing in fifty years would be
disappearance of
LF:the canonical text. He didn't just mean bit-flipping, as any regular
Napster
LF:user will confirm.
LF:
LF:Faced with several dozen versions of Heartbreak Hotel, many of
different
LF:lengths, recorded at different bitrates, how do you know which version
is
LF:the definitive recording? Which one drops the start, and adds dead
space at
LF:the end? At least the central server model ought to guarantee some
LF:redundancy. The redundancy in the Napster model is really a redundancy
of
LF:incompleteness.
LF:
LF:These questions alone should be enough to sober up the quite frantic
P2P
LF:hype - at least a little. For now though, Groove appears to have made
an
LF:excellent debut, particularly in making its developer material
available and
LF:friendly. ®
LF:
LF:
LF:
LF:Luke Flemmer
LF:VP Strategic Ventures
LF:nano
LF:phone: (212) 402-7870
LF:fax:      (212) 430-6374
LF:www.nano.com
LF:
LF: