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.

With the messaging space race maturing, Lotus is taking the opportunity to migrate off the native Domino and Notes infrastructure to the J2EE-based WebSphere and DB2 back end. The result: “a very modular mail component based on the new [IBM] Software Group common architecture,” Bisconti says.

But while Lotus fiddles with its transition to portlets and J2EE tag library toolkits, Microsoft is busy rolling out a suite of Office add-ons, such as OneNote and Xdocs , that embed collaborative functionality at the client level. “I’m not an expert on their technology,” Bisconti protests perhaps a bit too much, “but the concept of an end-user having control over their environment is a very valid one.”

“There’s a lot left to do in marrying some of the qualities that are possible in today’s portal solutions with the richness and information management and just overall workplace management that I count on my in-box for,” Bisconti says. “That’s going to evolve, and your in-box isn’t going to be your in-box the same way that it is today — there’s going to be more blending of what’s synchronous and asynchronous kind of communication.”

But Bisconti’s road map will take some time to play out. “Over time — and this is 2006, 2007 — everything that you’ve known and loved about Notes and Domino has probably found their way in influencing other technologies.” Bisconti ticks off the wish list: “[You’ll have] rapid application development in a really cool IDE (integrated development environment) or a very flexible offline support and device support, and an incredibly rich in-box that manages all the information that you deal with and now also includes presence awareness, etc.”

But, Ken, doesn’t this sound like what Microsoft already has in place with Office 11, Placeware, and Groove? Bisconti rolls a classic grenade down the aisle. “I talked to some partners who were at the Greenwich (Microsoft real-time server code name) briefing two weeks ago, and they were asking Microsoft about Groove, and Groove was nowhere in their product or solution environment[s]. So you probably ought to go back to Groove and Microsoft and ask them to explain what that future is.”

Oh, yes … that reminds me. Speaking of Groove, it’s time to answer Ray Ozzie’s question, why the Mac? It’s our collaborative platform of choice today, for all sorts of little reasons: integrated spell-checking, chat, presence, media-rich services across all apps, smart networking tools that adapt to wired and wireless domains, and a power-saving mode that lets me leave the machine unattended for seven days, ready to be reawakened when I lift the lid.

Microsoft has the deeper XML architecture and Lotus the developer mind share. Remember the messaging race, where Lotus and then Microsoft beat Netscape’s pastiche of point products by adding open protocols to their existing collaboration platforms? Today it is Microsoft and perhaps Lotus who are trying to patch and integrate a variety of point products into a seamless next-generation architecture, while Apple adds collaborative services to the core of its next-generation operating system at far greater speed.

Who is the tortoise now?