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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Thursday, September 05, 2002Ray Ozzie responds directly to Joel's remarks in a long and well written piece that offers a lot of insights in Groove's strategy. A mustread for everyone who is interested in Groove. [Jeroen Bekkers]
I've concluded that Groove is greedy. It's not because of Applications vs. Platforms, or that the client costs money. I see Groove as a P2P Service. The value is almost entirely in the service, not the platform and client. The clients cost money because services that look just like software are very hard to sell.
I think that Groove is greedy because the total cost of deploying Groove for a large number of seats is astronomical. Imagine that you've got the Groove religion. You want to Groove-enable all of your enterprise applications and roll them out to 2000 employees in a half-dozen locations. Groove only lets you use their service for free for up to 100 seats. With over 300 employees in each office, likely to be Grooving mostly amongst themselves, you'll need an Enterprise Relay Server at each location to reduce bandwidth utilization. Having some Enterprise Management Servers seems like a requirement, otherwise your employees could install any Groove applications that they want. And you'll certainly need a few Enterprise Integration Servers to connect Groove clients to non-Groove applications.
Those server programs cost $9995 to $19995 each, plus CALs. Much of the functionality they provide is free or low-cost on other platforms, but even if Groove made them free tomorrow, Groove Workspace is still more expensive than Notes or Exchange clients/CALs. In this example the price gap is more than enough to buy the Notes or Exchange server software and hardware. And Groove doesn't do email.
There are compelling uses of Groove. Groove is ideal for small working groups that are distributed, and the ability to form ad-hoc working groups is pure genius. Unfortunately, the emphasis is on small. The tipping point where Groove becomes more expensive than traditional collaboration solutions seems extremely low.
CNET: Maxtor buffs up DiamondMax drives. Flagship model is 160GB, two platters, 7200RPM. Yawn.
What I find interesting is that all of the drive manufacturers are limiting their ATA product lines to dual-platter designs. WD is the exception, using three platters for their flagship 200GB model. Way back when the IBM's 75GXP line was king (mid-Y2K), their flagship 75GB model was a 5-platter monster.
Update 9/11/02: Wes had also noted the trend of fewer platters, and Maxtor later announced a four-platter 5400RPM model.
