Sidebar: Easing the Communications Need

Computerworld - Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Groove Networks Inc., continues his conversation with Computerworld, focusing on how collaboration software meets the needs of various types of customers.
Will the project of making collaborative software continue to engage you? What keeps it interesting? There are several things that keep my juices flowing. I am a technologist, so I do like being close to building technology, and I like taking on new challenges. But I also really enjoy watching how this technology is integrated into people's businesses and how it changes those businesses, and then taking that feedback and refining it. We've barely scratched the surface in terms of how communications technology can help change the nature of business and government in ways that are net positive.
We at Groove have talked about a lot of the work we've done with the government, and it feels great, because you can see tangibly -- even amid bureaucracy, amid structures that have been around for ages -- that people want to use the technology to make a difference. Technology is not a panacea. You need policies and procedures to make effective information-sharing across boundaries work, but it's great to be a part of it and ... bring that technology to people on the defense side, on the nongovernmental organization, humanitarian side. We see how they're using it; we then plow that feedback back into the product, and it takes it into a new generation. We've already got a list of significant things that we need to do to the product to bring it to v4, based on how those people are using it now.
I think we've barely scratched the surface in terms of how communications technologies are going to impact customers. So long as there is improvement that we can see in terms of how they can be used, that's what turns me on. So I've got a long way to go.
Persuading users that a specific tool is going to actually make their lives easier would seem to be one of the big hurdles for collaborative software. How do you approach that problem? Many years ago, I built a product called Symphony -- it was combination word processor and spreadsheet -- and it was catering to the notion that once you learn one module, you want to live there. So there were people who did their word processing in a spreadsheet. Today, there are people who do their word processing in PowerPoint. They learn PowerPoint, and that's where they want to stay.