Rui CarmoSpent an overwhelming part of my day inside a meeting room, leaving much real work to be done. But let's see what happened today, shall we?
The biggest piece of news, as far as I'm concerned, was Microsoft's acquisition of Groove.
I can say now that I saw this one coming a mile away, ever since version 3.0 came out - Groove was not only becoming exclusively Windows-centric, but it also filled in a niche that Microsoft didn't have the right technology for.
(Not to mention that it actually made it possible for people to work cooperatively without, say, an Exchange server.)
Although it can be argued that Microsoft has its own fair share of "serious" P2P and collaboration technologies, its portfolio was miles behind the sheer genius of Groove and displayed an amazing lack of market savvy by picking entirely the wrong groupware technologies to bet on - for instance, Microsoft is even now trying to re-launch its corporate IM offering, which is a solution in search of a problem if I ever saw one.
As to Groove, I fully expect it to be subsumed by some twist on their new Exchange/SharePoint groupware initiatives. I also don't think it will ever become cross-platform (i.e., available on the Mac), even if portions of it are bundled into Office. Half of the internals seemed to be Windows-native by the time it reached 3.0, and its cross-platform efforts never saw the light of day.
In short, it's Visio, all over again.
More News
- Still in the collaboration front, iFolder (the closest thing to Groove file sharing out there, at least on a LAN) has new releases available (including the Mac client). It is still vastly underwhelming, and refuses to work on most of my machines. Where it does run, I have no other machine to talk to due to firewall rules. Repeat after me: If you want this to be useful, it has to work across any firewall. Look at Skype, for instance. If voice works, why can't file syncing work too? Or is it too obviously P2P (in a bad way) to be considered a useful office tool?
- The Motorola iPhone was delayed. The reasons are intriguing, and I'm very curious to see how the whole thing will pan out.
- Nuno also has problems with his iMac G5. I've decided to fix my RAM problems on my own and send a formal complaint to the shop in question later on, but he's worse off than me.
- Tim Bray published Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career. I am sorry to say that I have yet to see most of them work in real life (at least the good ones).