The tortoise and the hare

It came at the end of a conversation with Groove Networks Chairman Ray Ozzie. We’d been talking about the disruptive technology of collaborative services — the emerging Groove Web Services architecture and its implications for extending Groove’s peer services across the pervasive platform boundary.

In preparation for the conversation, I’d sent Ray the list of our top10 disruptive technologies. One in particular — the Mac’s OS X — caught his attention. “What’s so interesting about it?” Ray asked. “I don’t get it.” He’s not the only one.

“This whole world of real-time collaboration is not going to play out the same way that messaging did.” The speaker is Ken Bisconti, vice president of Messaging and Advanced Collaboration at IBM’s Lotus group, and it’s a month later at Lotusphere 2003 in Orlando . The annual gathering of IBM’s Lotus software business partners and developers has gone well, with new Lotus general manager Ambuj Goyal highlighting the increased integration of Lotus’ real-time collaboration products into IBM’s WebSphere/DB2 platform.

“They want something that’s even more modular and componentized than what we have today,” Bisconti says. “They” are Lotus developers, 20,000 business partners strong as they swarm DisneyWorld ’s Dolphin and Swan hotels. For a decade, Lotus has been locked in a battle with Microsoft for control of the sweet spot in collaboration, and now the game is changing.

“They have already seen some of the analysts start to write about this space as if they’re replaying their e-mail tapes, and [with] some of them … we just want to say — look, you guys are not getting this.” Bisconti fumbles for the right words.

Finally, he nails it. “Microsoft can’t just stuff this (real-time communications) into the operating system and suddenly declare leadership here because presence awareness is finding its way into Web sites, into ISV applications, into your in-box. … As I go through my day, I’m liable to traverse 20 different presence-awarenes sources. It's not like e-mail today, [where] you have one or two in-boxes.”

Yes, and it’s not like the past decade of messaging wars between Lotus and Microsoft. “We’ve each sold into market over 100 million licenses; we each have active users of probably 50 to 60 percent of the overall licenses that we’ve actually sold over the last ten years.” But the messaging market is a mature one, with most growth in emerging markets such as India and China .

“We saw Web Mail and iNotes usage grow over 100 percent year on year last year,” Bisconti notes, “whereas the overall messaging business was relatively flat.” But Lotus sees an opening in the midmarket, in shops looking for basic e-mail functionality.