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| Shore's
Research, Commentary and Consulting Receives Prestigious
Recognition.
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Feelin' Groovy: Microsoft Goes with
Groove to Create Collaborative Content |
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14 March 2005 |
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Ray Ozzie nursed the Lotus Notes collaborative software in
the 1990's from its infancy to widespread use and its
acquisition by IBM. Now Microsoft has purchased Groove
Networks, Ozzie's second shot at content collaboration with
a more peer-to-peer model of content publishing and
sharing. Premium publishers have oftentimes ignored file
sharing networks as legitimate marketing venues for their
wares, but with the Groove acquisition publishers have been
put on notice that user-controlled collaborative tools are
a key and increasingly crucial environment in which to
establish their value. When the users control who and what
gets shared across organizations, publishers had best
understand the value proposition of Groove rather quickly. |
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There's a
lot more than we can do with our PCs than we could at the dawn
of the personal computing era. But at its core the PC's
original value proposition as a standalone publishing tool
rests largely intact. The Microsoft Office suite at its heart
is still about creating documents in Word and Excel that get
squished into PowerPoint presentations now and again and shoved
around from user to user in Outlook email. With PCs the concept
of "us" as a publishing metaphor is largely ignored or
machinated into server platforms that limit the usefulness of
the PC itself. In the meantime a legion of publishing and
content tools grew up via multi-user computing platforms and
networks that focused on the importance of collaboration and
combined resources in creating content value. The PC's
Office-bound future as a fundamental authoring platform for
standalone businesses content in an era demanding sophisticated
knowledge management and content sharing is not looking so
bright as a result.
Not to be left on the sidelines Microsoft
has
made a bold move by acquiring
Groove Networks, a Beverly, Massachusetts-based
company of 200 that has been honing its sophisticated content
collaboration tools for more than seven years, resulting in a
piece of affordable software that anyone can download and
install to share content with others. In essence Groove is
desktop software that facilitates file sharing networks
allowing users to save files to their desktop via normal
Windows tools and have them appear automatically in updated
form on the desktops of a controlled group of peers. Project
management tools, text messaging and forms-driven application
development for content sharing add the ability for users to
create whole work environments with sophisticated permissioning
capabilities. If all of this sounds a lot like Lotus Notes, it
should - Groove's founder Ray Ozzie was the father of that
1990's pioneering effort at collaborative content creation and
distribution. Ozzie will don a CTO cap at Microsoft as a part
of the deal, buying them instant credibility on the "vision
thing" that had been lacking in many analysts' eyes.
All great for technology analysts to
ponder, but what about the content-conscious amongst us? The
move is significant in that it signals an accelerating trend
away from the familiar Office authoring tools just as some
publishers were hoping to use its Research Task Pane and
XML-based Office tools to hook into the workflow of its
institutional clients. Neither Office or the Research Task Pane
are going to disappear any time soon, but the trend to watch is
the increasing availability of content sharing networks used to
assemble flexible and oftentimes intra-organizational networks
of professionals needing content from one another to get a job
done. the Office containers still matter, but it's the
collaborative space that will drive much institutional content
in the years ahead. Here are a few key point for providers of
premium content to consider as professionals opt in to
high-octane file sharing networks that may span organizations:
- Professionally-oriented publishers
cannot ignore file sharing any more. Wonder why we're
keeping an eye on those file sharing networks that the kids
use to spin out tunes to one another? Wonder no more: file
sharing has been an increasing reality on the institutional
scene via Groove and other leading collaboration tools. In
the best of circumstances premium content providers try to
weave their own tools to capture the collaborative needs of
their clients, but with the highly fluid world of file
sharing content needs come and go oftentimes before
traditional purchasing and subscription schemes can be
considered relevant marketing tools The experiences of
premium content providers on public file sharing networks
offer a number of interesting models - and warnings - for
premium content providers to consider as they take
institutional file sharing networks such as Groove more
seriously. The good news is that product like Groove offer a
management framework for content that's likely to be friendly
to the interests of professional publishers if they delve
into it aggressively.
- Professionally-oriented publishers
may want to rethink their indifference towards redistribution
and rights management capabilities. Content's always
flowed easily from one organization to another via emails and
other electronic media, but the management of rights to
electronically redistributed premium content continues to
lag. With tools such as Groove making it far easier for
premium content to move from one organization to another
unconsciously, rights management schemes that work for the
sponsoring institutions may not be the ones that have the
licensing interests of publishers in mind. Being able to
accept individuals in professional file sharing networks as
distribution partners to assist publishers in the licensing
and re-licensing of content may create new opportunities for
these users to "do the right thing" and assist publishers in
gaining both revenues and new client bases.
- Professionally-oriented publishers
have an opportunity to act as team members. A tool like
Groove with Microsoft backing creates a great opportunity for
premium content to be recognized widely as a local resource
both by individuals and teams in new ways that depend as much
on the needs of that group as they do on the provider of
premium content. Each Web page, XML object or other
presentation of premium content making itself available in a
collaborative space has the opportunity to be an ambassador
of the publisher to that very specific community's publishing
needs that can be promoted by team members who understand a
publisher's value. By creating "hooks" in their content that
assume collaborative use and that respond to use by a given
group of people, premium publishers can in effect become
surrogate team members helping to solve specific aspects of
their information needs.
As powerful tools such Groove make it
easier than ever for users to create their own tightly-knit
publishing networks it becomes all the more important for
premium publishers to consider how their value proposition can
become enhanced via the use of its content by specific groups
of professional users. Think of Microsoft's purchase of Groove
as a wake-up call to publishers everywhere to recognize that
their content has a life of its own in collaborative groups -
and that it's a great thing that it does if they know how to
exploit it effectively.
-
John Blossom
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