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 COLUMN
Groove's rubber soul THE RUBBER MEETS the road this week as Microsoft unveils .NET My Services at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. And what a fitting location for .NET's Trojan horse, next door to Hollywood's dream factory. While Sun trumpets its Liberty Alliance and privacy groups fret over Passport, the technology formerly known as HailStorm is poised to slip Web services into production sooner than commonly expected.
But a quick flashback suggests another possible scenario. Remember how home users bought their kids cheap, fast PCs preloaded with Windows 95 and Office 97, then drove IT crazy at work with ad hoc upgrades of OS and productivity apps? When the smoke cleared, Office was on its way to 90 percent market share. Same thing with instant messaging: ICQ started as a hacker and gamer tool, but America Online's decision to open its buddy lists to the Web jump-started a 100-million member platform. Only then did corporate teams adopt the technology, ignoring the security and intellectual property holes punched in the network. Thus came Napster and its peer-to-peer partners in crime. The jury is still out on how to productize decentralized systems, but Microsoft's investment in Ray Ozzie's Groove startup only cements a collaboration that has been in play for more than a year. Sun's JXTA suggests a marriage of convenience between the open-source, Java, and XML communities. On the surface, the Groove-Microsoft alliance is a severe case of strange bedfellows. Ozzie virtually held off wave after wave of attack by Microsoft and its Exchange Server team singlehandedly, creating in Notes the largest third-party Windows application. Microsoft product managers were fond of telling us how many copies of NT Notes and Domino servers sold, but still the battle raged. When Exchange 2000 shipped, the product had caught up, both in sales and technology, with its Web storage system providing Domino-like browser-based access to the unstructured messaging and groupware data store. But Ozzie was long gone by then, rearchitecting his collaborative vision around -- wait a minute -- not a browser but a rich COM (Component Object Model) and XML-based client. To some, Groove seems to be swimming against the open-standards tide. SOAP co-author Dave Winer calls Groove a closed architecture; XML pioneer Tim Bray thinks it struggles against rather than works with the Net. But ever since Groove's coming-out party a year ago, Bill Gates has touted the joys of Groove as a premier application of the .NET age. Microsoft loves the rich client. Groove has been called the next version of Notes, but it's starting to look more like the next version of Office instead. For Office.NET, peer services represent both a fertile path for innovation and a rationale for upgrading. The Groove preview client has many Notes-and Outlook-like services -- archived instant messages (read p-to-p e-mail), team-based calendaring, threaded discussions with unread marks, and a virtual file store -- and as is the browser model, it's free. It's easy to see what Ozzie gets out of the relationship with Microsoft. Groove leverages COM as its object model, bootstrapping Visual Studio as its IDE. But the real common ground with .NET is XML, and here Groove engineers have contributed significantly to the underlying services shared by peer and Web services. For example, .NET My Services architect Mark Lucovsky says Ray and brother Jack Ozzie provided help on HailStorm's notification pump and routing engine. Other sharing includes work on Hailstorm's identity framework and the Presence APIs. In return, Microsoft has worked with the Ozzies on Office integration, support for NetMeeting videoconferencing, and mapping Groove's XML security system on top of the Passport identity model. Lucovsky's HailStorm XML effort is the leading edge of a revolution at Microsoft that may well sweep through the next generation SQL Server architecture, code-named Yukon, and lead a transformation of the underlying platform. Lucovsky's design leverages XML not just as a method of transporting data between systems, but as an object model to be programmed against. Lucovsky may see this as a gamble, but Bill Gates' support means HailStorm is playing on house odds. In this context, Ozzie's partnering with a Microsoft deeply committed to XML technologies is less of a capitulation and more of a pragmatic win-win situation. Indeed, Groove will use a PDC keynote to demonstrate alpha code of a Groove application running on a Pocket PC device. Microsoft gets a sexy new pervasive application built with the just-shipping .NET Compact Framework, and Groove goes mobile with rapid development tools that leverage .NET's SOAP services-processing architecture and Pocket PC 2002 support for Windows Messenger, VPNs, and 802.11b wireless. But Ozzie insists he hasn't sold his soul, not even a percentage of it. Groove's XML, SOAP, and XML-RPC underpinnings allow Groove services to work with other platforms as they gain market and mind share. But the holidays are almost here and the early bird gets the worm. When that My Services alert shows up with a 20 percent discount on the Disney DVD my daughter wants, I may click first and ask questions later. Steve Gillmor is the InfoWorld Test Center director. Reach him at steve_gillmor@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business NewsMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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