Creative disruption

Ray Ozzie, founder, chairman, and CEO of Groove Networks, has been a creator and harnesser of disruptive technology since the dawn of the client/server age. In a conversation with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and Lead Analyst Jon Udell, Ozzie discusses the unique nature of disruptive technologies, the role of collaboration tools in the workplace, and the emerging law of unintended consequences.

SG: Is disruption a force for evil or good?

RO: Neither, it just is. When I look at the 10 disruptive technologies on your list, I don't see them as being disruptive in themselves. I see them as being woven together into something that might catalyze an industry or business disruption.

SG: How do you arrange for the possibility of a positive disruption?

RO: A successful platform is fractal in nature. You can build something unintended out of the piece parts. At the user level, in Groove, users can quickly bring together tools, people, and systems to solve some problem. It's glue, all the way up at the user level. If you descend to the next level, as you well know, we didn't have anything at the outset of Groove that let a script do glue kinds of things. Now that's what the Web services effort is attempting to target. The more you get toward the C++ end of the world, the less spontaneous it becomes. All disruption comes from a soup of elements from which unintended consequences can result.

JU: When asked to explain how Weblogs, Web services, and digital identity are jointly disruptive, I realized that the trust that exists in the Weblog space is related to digital identity. You know that authors have to authenticate in order to post, and you can see the reputations that people build up over time.

RO: The fact that I can recognize your writing, for example, is truly fascinating. We get caught up in the low-level infrastructure, but I don't think that's where the action is. We started Groove with the notion that there's a distinct difference between peer-and enterprise-blessed trust. But if I'm going to let people work at the edge, I need them to understand who they're sharing information with, so they don't say something inappropriate. It's easy to slap up a list of members of the space, but it's also important to communicate who's in your organization, who's in another --

JU: And to be able to check out their history.

RO: Exactly. So we allowed enterprises to cross-certify other enterprises or domains within the enterprise, and the trust icon we display is unique based on whether it's your enterprise, someone else's enterprise, an individual whose fingerprint you've verified, or whether they're untrusted.

SG: Some say the jury's out as to whether people really want to collaborate at all. What's your take?

RO: These days the notion of working with other people is becoming more and more important. How effectively we solve problems together is a really big deal. Most people will say, "No, I don't collaborate, I just do my job." But if you look at their e-mail, there are immense numbers of interactions.