At the University of Illinois, Ray Ozzie worked on
PLATO Notes, one of the earliest collaboration applications.
Later he wanted to develop collaboration
software of his own, but couldn’t find funding. After
he led the development of Lotus Symphony, Mitch
Kapor and Jonathan Sachs decided to invest in
Ozzie’s idea, which would become Lotus Notes. Instead
of working as an employee, Ozzie founded Iris
Associates in 1984 to develop the product for Lotus.
It was an unusual form of startup, but it worked.
Lotus Notes was the first widely used collaboration
software. The first release shipped in 1989, and
Iris was acquired by Lotus in 1994.
In 1997, Ozzie founded Groove Networks, which built Internet-based workgroup
collaboration software. Microsoft acquired Groove in 2005 and named
Ozzie chief technical officer. In June 2006, he took over as chief software architect
from Bill Gates.
Livingston: When you started Groove, where were you and who was there?
What was the first piece of code anyone wrote for Groove? What did it do?
Ozzie: When we first started Groove in the fall of ’97, we worked out of my
house. Initially, it was my brother Jack, Eric Patey, and Brian Lambert. A few
weeks later, we moved to an office space at the Cummings Center in Beverly,
Massachusetts. A couple months into the project, another former Iris engineer,
Ken Moore, joined our team. The first thing we coded was a primitive version
of our synchronization algorithm.
Livingston: How did you come up with your ideas?
Ozzie: The common theme to both Iris and Groove was the fact that the ideas
were not based on technology, but on a need I saw for users or potential customers
for the product. I’m an engineer by training and I tend to be one of
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these people who believes he can accomplish basically anything in software—
it’s just a big toolbox. So if you know that you can accomplish anything you set
your mind to, what’s worth accomplishing?
I’ve never taken the perspective of “build a cool piece of technology and see
where it goes.” It’s more or less been based on an intuition about a hole in the
market—or, more accurately, a future hole in the market. At any given time,
you’ve got to have a technology roadmap in your mind and a market roadmap as
to where things are headed—broadband is getting increasingly pervasive or
wireless is getting increasingly pervasive, or something is going on—and trying
to project out several years, because it will take you several years to build anything
that’s worth building. So you don’t want to fill today’s needs, but try to

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