Tech Update: Ray Ozzie was the original mastermind behind Notes.
Zollar: Yes.
Tech Update: Not only has he and his company [Groove] received an infusion of $51 million of Microsoft's money, [but] Microsoft appears to be placing a bet on the resurgence of peer-to-peer computing. In your mind, will peer-to-peer come back? And what's it like to know that a part of the Lotus brain trust has defected to your biggest competitor?
Zollar: Well, people move on. Ray did a wonderful thing in creating Notes and has moved on. First of all, let me talk about peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer is a bunch of baloney in terms of it being a collaboration architecture. There's this notion that [in peer-to-peer] there's no server. If you look underneath Groove's architecture, it's a server that just happens to be on Groove's premises, right? So, the connection, and real-time update of the "peer participants" is actually being coordinated by a server. It kind of proves that point that I make when I talk to customers about this stuff. That is, the model of the Internet is a server-centric model. But, it is orchestrated by individuals at the end points. That's what we really exploit with our capabilities in products like SameTime and QuickPlace. The ability to have what I really think is the value proposition, as opposed to the techno-babble around peer-to-peer. The value proposition is: I get instant collaboration. I don't have to go through a central IT organization to get all kinds of authorizations and all that other stuff that results in delays. I can begin collaborating with a colleague, inside my organization--or outside my organization--instantly. That's the real value that we focused on.
So, now, there's all this talk about this new model, Groove. And others are trying to create it, too. Fine. Wherever that goes, it will be interesting to see. We are out demonstrating it today with real customers like G.E. and Ericsson. IBM is a large user of this capability. We've got this stuff in deployment delivering this kind of instant collaboration. Let the market decide. If I look at the alliance that has been struck between Groove and Microsoft, I think it's really a marriage of convenience. They needed somebody to support the Tablet PC. Groove needed money.
Tech Update: Speaking of SameTime, AOL's instant messenger has such limited penetration in business, compared to Yahoo's. So, shouldn't Lotus be seeking that interoperability with Yahoo instead of AOL?
Zollar: In this whole area, there's a lot of hype. A lot of discussion. A lot of parties involved. We stand for universal interoperability. That's what we want to achieve. This notion that you have camps of interoperability is not sustainable in the long term. It's really a matter of time in terms of the hardening of the [instant messaging standard]. So, we're working very actively to harden that, and to demonstrate interoperability with the specific providers, against the messaging capability. AOL has been our partner for a while. We provide client-side interoperability today between our SameTime instant messenger and AOL's.
But what companies really want, and what the industry really wants, is namespace interoperability across a deployment that is inside of an organization with communities that that organization needs to interact with outside of the organization. They want to have strong authentication across those connections. Because, companies using Yahoo Instant Messenger to collaborate with partners or other businesses, outside of their organizations may as well just shout it over the radio because it's equivalent with the level of security that exists in those environments today. So, that's what the world wants, and that's what we're planning to do. We're not announcing anything, but certainly we want to get to the point where all the providers are federated in a way that allows customers to achieve what they want.
Tech Update: If that happened it would simplify the management of the desktop. Because, in order to make it work now, you have to have three or four different clients running.
Zollar: Yes, the notion of who's going to provide the Instant Messenger client...obviously, with Windows XP, people are going to have one on their desktops. [Editor's note: Windows XP comes with a built-in, updated version of MSN Messenger instant messaging software]. There may be some additional variations, but that's why I think that the real issue is server-to-server and interoperability across namespaces, and domains.
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