There tends to...
There tends to be some time where I’m building up a level of technological
advantage for when we get to market. With technology, there’s no such thing as
a sustainable advantage, but you can get a good running start if you concentrate
on doing something hard really well.
In Notes, it was the database and replication environment and the security
aspects. In Groove, it was the security aspects again and this transaction synchronization
and the peer-to-peer XML-based communications. Most people
find risk and uncertainty very daunting. In both Notes and Groove, there was
both technological uncertainty and market uncertainty. We knew we were
embarking on something that was technologically very difficult and would take
several years. But you know that the market is going to change during those
years, so virtually everything you do, you have to late-bind the decisions. You
can’t completely predetermine all the user interface or integration decisions.
You cannot early-bind marketing and positioning decisions because the market
and competitive environment will be different.
Some people cope with uncertainty by being really comfortable in their own
little box. Some developers, for example, will divide the problem and divide the
problem until they only have to work on this little piece of the database or this
little piece of the communications, and they just don’t worry about the stuff
above that. They leave that to people like me to deal with, in terms of the risk
and continuing to be on the right path. To be on that long of a time frame, you
have to be able to change as the market changes.
So there were a number of things over the course of the years at Groove
that changed dramatically. At one point early on, we were giving an equal focus
to the media/entertainment and productivity applications of our technology.
When we started Groove in ’97, it was the Bubble, and because you can apply
technology in many ways, we thought that we’d bring it to market to serve a
number of different things. By the time we brought it to market in late 2000,
things were starting to get a little serious, and we decided to concentrate on the
productivity realm instead of consumer applications.
Then once we really doubled down that path, it meant that we had to take a
lot more enterprise manageability things seriously than we had early on, which
brought with it a lot of burden and a lot of changes within the company.
Livingston: If you do have this long time frame, are you extra nervous about
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