sure we could...
sure we could build it, we decided to hire the first 15 to 20 people and just
embarked on the project.
Livingston: Masterless synchronization was a novel technology that you guys
really had to work through?
Ozzie: It had been done for years in a variety of settings—especially in an academic
setting. But the commercial PC environment is a very harsh one. People
Ray Ozzie 105
reboot PCs, they restore them from backups, they lose them. It has to be very
resilient. We wanted to make sure the algorithms we were using would scale to
what we needed.
All those early technology choices were like that. Initially we thought we’d
be using Java, but we ended up not using it because we concluded that there
would never be a stable runtime environment that we could count on on all
desktop PCs. It didn’t seem like Sun, with all due respect, really was on a path
to having a stable client-side environment. And we needed the thing to work
within several clicks on random PCs worldwide without anybody supporting
them. So we ended up having to do a lot of extra work using C++.
Livingston:Was there an initial customer who was so happy with the product
that you just knew Groove was going to fly?
Ozzie: We launched Groove in beta in October 2000, 3 years to the month
when we first formed the company. We didn’t ship the first commercially available
version of Groove until April 2001. When we did, we announced a 10,000
seat deal with GlaxoSmithKline, the major pharmaceutical company. They are a
big Notes customer, but saw the opportunity for Groove to address some of the
cross-boundary collaboration needs they have in bringing new products to market.
In hindsight, that initial sale may have hurt us more than it helped. We
deluded ourselves into thinking we could sell Groove into enterprises like
GlaxoSmithKline far more quickly and systematically than turned out to be the
case. We really hadn’t paid our dues yet in terms of making Groove “enterprise
ready.” We did that in subsequent releases of the product, but still struggled to
develop a successful, repeatable sales model for the enterprise. It was
extremely difficult to sell new technology like Groove into enterprises at a time
when their sole focus was on reducing costs and increasing security.
Livingston: What else was hard in those 3 “stealth” years?
Ozzie: The thing that’s not really characteristic, that doesn’t really translate
from both of my startups to what other entrepreneurs do, is that I think of the
challenges I take on as 10-year challenges, not filling a quick market niche.
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