March 11, 2005

Yesterday, Microsoft quietly acquired Groove Technologies, for an undisclosed amount, and at the same time it appointed Groove's founder, Ray Ozzie, the CTO of Microsoft.

Ray Ozzie, who also created Lotus Notes, set up Groove in 1997. Grove has enjoyed millions of dollars in investment from Microsoft since its founding, fielded a collaboration product known as "Virtual Office," and had a close partnership with Microsoft, so the acquisition is not so much of a surprise as why Microsoft waited so long to execute it.

The answer to that lies in Microsoft's increasing emphasis on collaboration. The strategy is simple. Microsoft's ubiquitous productivity application already own vast amounts of unstructured business information, and the company thereby has excellent leverage to add structural logic -- in the form of e.g. the portal, content management, and collaboration -- to its offerings.

As a research note from Gartner recently observed, "Microsoft wants to make its collaboration platform ubiquitous. The company aims to achieve this goal by shifting more of these services to Windows middleware and using its dominance in client applications to shape the ways end users work with other collaboration services."

Microsoft's vision of the future of information workers is one that informs every area of its business, from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to instant messaging (IM) and Office itself, which, thanks to ongoing development and the acquisition of Groove, will be able to support contextual collaboration -- viz., from within applications, preserving existing workflows and ramping up productivity.

Source: Line 56