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.

JU: You’ve said that “attention rendezvous” can boost group productivity by an order of magnitude. How do you engineer an environment in which that can happen?

RO: This fits more into the topic of unintended consequences. It’s a flocking behavior. We started with a [highly granular] notification feature. The side effect is that when you follow up on an alert, you find that six other smart people of the 15 in that space made the same selfish decision, and suddenly we’re all together. You’re essentially meshing more activities into your life, in a way that’s more socially acceptable to you. Mutual selfish behavior yields a greater-good outcome.

SG: Mesh networking is one of the things we think will explode in the coming year. How do you stitch together the recombinant opportunities of a technology like Wi-Fi?

RO: It’s yet another case where technology at the edge is catalyzing something that couldn’t happen, or didn’t happen, in a controlled and managed environment. We had, and have, a managed telco ecosystem. The concepts behind mesh networks, and unlicensed spectrum in general, are such that they enable innovation in general. I’m passionate around the whole end-to-end thing, and this is in support of that concept. We’re going to see a lot of innovative uses of smart clients, sometimes with physical proximity and sometimes not, assuming mobility and a higher level of bandwidth than we’ve been able to assume in the past. The key technologies that sit on the shoulders of Wi-Fi are then synchronization — because if you have multiple devices and you’re dealing with many people with multiple devices, synchronization is key — and Web services — because you’re going to want to have your devices requesting programmatic services of things on other devices.

JU: When you live and work in a highly synchronized environment, to what extent does the conventional notion of backup fade away?

RO: Keeping a shared space on multiple devices does, from a practical standpoint, satisfy the robustness requirement that backup is generally used for. But backup is also used for retention. Synchronization doesn’t solve that, and the marketplace is telling us it wants centralized retention. Individuals like the robustness at the edge and don’t care as much about retention. In the corporate world, all the regulatory compliance is increasing the focus on centralized — I don’t think I’d call it backup — auditing.

JU: How do you react when businesses suggest that what Groove empowers people to do is potentially a negative disruption in terms of loss of visibility and control?

RO: It’s a fascinating topic. IT in this enhanced regulatory environment is worried more and more about retention: They want to run locked-down environments; we’re returning to extreme control. The amazing thing is that individuals are being exposed to tremendously capable things at home. I don’t say everybody will start to work from home, but maybe they’ll start to bring their home tools into the office. There will be new battles, just like there were battles about Palm Pilots, because they might take data out of the company.

JU: We think of these collaboration technologies as enabling far-flung virtual groups, but in fact when people are shoulder to shoulder it still has potentially interesting applications. You live in that world more than most people. Can you give us a window into it?

RO: I’ll do it by example. This is something that’s happened a number of times around here, and I’m really enjoying it. Whenever a group of people from Groove Networks — because we’re really hip with the technology, we understand it viscerally — whenever we have third parties in presenting to us, customers or another vendor, a bunch of them and a bunch of us, [Groove folks] are online with one another in a shared space, and we are connecting each other’s minds, asking each other questions, formulating how we should ask the person presenting to us. We’re teeing up ideas or questions, listening to the customer talk about their problem, so by the time we [have] an opening we [are] all on the same page.

JU: And conceivably they could have been doing the same thing, and that would be great; it means the total exercise is more productive for everybody.

RO: Absolutely.

SG: The fabric of the communication is multilayered, is what we’re saying here.

RO: That’s exactly right, and these parallel channels are really useful because we do have the ability, some more than others, to multitask, and sometimes that multitasking can be used to bring … greater focus to the task at hand. One more simple example. We interview candidates. You have one person after another interviewing the candidate. The keepers will be around for a lot of the day. A really good use of the technology is to have the people who are interviewing, live, talk into the shared space so that you can tee things up for the next interviewer. You can see what happened in the previous session by the time you get to do your interview. It’s a very useful mechanism that mixes real-time, face-to-face meetings with both time separation and geography separation.

JU: It’s a tremendous accelerator because to the extent you recapitulate in session after session, you’re wasting a ton of bandwidth because speech is so slow for that purpose. But if it’s transcribed to some extent, people can rip through it in a fraction of the time.

RO: Yup. Or consider the following. Interviewer A interviews the candidate, then B does, then C. Now A and B see each other in the hallway, they talk, and one says, “You know, I really meant to ask … .” So you go back into the space and tell C, while he’s interviewing live, to ask the question. If you want to talk about the value of this stuff, the single thing that resonates most is time compression. You have a limited amount of attention, a limited amount of time, you want to manage your life in a way that serves you and serves the people you need to serve. These kinds of tools help you — I’ll go back to meshing — they help you mesh things in such a way that just works.