Groove and a few other things. I saw the announcement
today that Groove is being acquired by Microsoft and Ray Ozzie is
joining as another CTO. Congratulations to Ray and all the Groove
people! I hope this is good for you. For Massachusetts, this is a great
thing: Microsoft finally has a real development office here. For the
Peer-to-Peer world this is very good. We have Microsoft officially
endorsing decentralized communications and personal data sharing.
Hopefully we can get rid of the images of illegal song swapping and
replace them with images of tsunami relief agencies communicating. For
privacy this is good: Groove was built from the ground up with privacy
firmly in mind and this is another endorsement of building things that
way (Skype is another one but probably less thorough). For taming the
“evil empire” this is good, too: Ray is a great, thoughtful,
principled, and caring person. He's not a competitive shark looking for
food. Having him at that level in Microsoft at the ear of people who
clearly respect him and know what they're getting is a good sign. [Dan Bricklin's Log]