capture some window that will happen in the future.
In Notes, it was (and this is hard to imagine because it was a different time)
the concept that we’d all be using computers on our desktops and therefore we
might want to use them as communication tools. This was a time when PCs
were just emerging as spreadsheet tools and word processing replacements,
still available only on a subset of desks, and definitely no networks. It was ’82
when I wrote the specs for it. It had been based on a system called PLATO that
I’d been exposed to at college, which was a large-scale interactive system that
people did learning and interactive gaming on, and things like that. It gave us a
little bit of a peek at the future—what it would be like if we all had access to
interactive systems and technology.
With Groove, it was an observation that the nature of work was changing.
Technology at that point had largely been applied to helping people work
together within corporate boundaries. People were increasingly going to be
challenged trying to apply that same technology across boundaries, because you
can’t control the technology chosen by your business partners. I might choose
Notes, you might choose Exchange, the other person might choose someone
else.
We saw a lot of frustration when our customers tried to deploy systems
across enterprises. So we came to the conclusion that what we really needed
was to build a system that just worked instantly, right after download, for the
end users.
Livingston: Were you trying to basically build a “better Lotus Notes” for the
Web?
Ozzie: Lotus Notes ended up being a multifaceted piece of software; it had
email, it was used for collaborative workspaces for people to do dynamic work
together. It was used as a content management system, as an application server.
Groove was really meant to fulfill just the collaborative workspaces piece.
We were laser-focused on the notion of people needing to dynamically assemble
in a virtual environment, share documents and their thoughts in order to get
work done very quickly, and then disassemble. In the work environment now,
increasingly you have to work with partners or customers directly, and this concept
of rapidly forming virtual workgroups would be an increasing challenge
and opportunity moving forward. The Web itself on the open Internet is an
alternative way of doing this, but we were really targeting people who needed
to work in a highly mobile fashion, behind the firewall, outside the firewall, and

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