Ray Ozzie’s Weblog: Ray Ozzie gets medieval on the future of email here.
“Anyone who is doing a critical business process online that involves substantial dialog between individuals should NOT be using email at this point in history, and many no longer are.”
That Ray feels this way shouldn’t be a surprise, since he runs Groove Networks, and it’s very much in his best interest to get rid of email. In response, Dave Winer had this to say:
“As I read it, and hear him pitch his product, it would be more convincing if Groove were open to competition, or at least open to being built on.”
I agree with Dave here, same as I did with Tim Bray when he wrote:
“Are You a Sharecropper? If you’re developing [for…] any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast.”
To their credit, Groove sells an integration server that will give you an API to work against. Sadly, it was $10,000 last I checked.
For the record, I have purchased Groove and use it for some things. I find it…slow. I’m on a fast machine at work, and Groove lags way behind other apps in terms of performance.