communicate :: collaborate :: commemorate

Groove: Ten Good Reasons Not To Buy

by Volker Weber

Robin Good:

Groove is a unique, powerful, almost supernatural collaboration tool, for which I have spent many words of praise, as it does represent a great breakthrough in terms of integration of facilities and vision for what may be the road of killer apps of the near future. Wonder why it is so hard to make Groove beyond an historical technology milestone and into mainstream use?

Here are some answers to ponder upon.

Read the ten reasons here >

Let me add a few more points:

11) Windows only. It does not run on all of my computers, or those of my peers.

12) Lives on an island. It does not talk to anything else. Not to any instant messaging or conference application.

13) No search. This looks like WOM (write only memory). You dump stuff in there and if you can't remember where you put it, it's gone.

14) No useful export. Again, write only memory. You dump stuff in there and there is no way to reuse it somewhere else. Binary XML export? Cool.

15) No print. Ooops. You can print some things. The easier ones. No calendar however.

16) No sync for names or dates. These things live in Clyde and whatever talks to this device. Groove does not.

17) Hen and egg dilemma. How useful is a telephone if you are the only person who has one?

18) No uninstall. If you install 3rd party tools, there is no way to wipe them from the system.

19) No uninstall, reloaded. Ever tried to uninstall Groove itself and then looked at the registry afterwards?

20) Did I mention it does not run on Lucy? Yes, I did. :-)

Comments

21) Groove treats "files" and "web links" as separate things. You can't have a consolidated list of folders into which both "files" and "web links" can be pasted. The folders have to be duplicated.

22) collaboration is about finding the easiest and simplest way of working together. The compromise is usually finding the lowest common denominator, especially concerning the tools. If one of the collaborators can't use Groove (company policy, firewall, no Windows, or simply not a big enough computer), all collaborators will work with something else, ie email etc.

(This argument is partially included in some of the previous ones)

23) Collaboration results often need to be published. Why is it so tideous to publish Groove output on a website? (Hugh Pyle started some tool, but it never got finalised) The web services & .NET stuff is something for specialists, not end users, not small businesses.

24) Groove has increasingly become a tool for large corporations and their security maniacs. This is stopping bottom up evolution (or viral spreading...).

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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