If Groove is so great why have i not heard about it.

1. When Ray Ozzie released Groove he had a small team of just 250 people - he knew he could not support thousands of small users - so he refused to market Groove to the industry and focussed on fortune 1000 clients who had their own inhouse IT resources. No ads were ever released, he relied on the trickle down effect as well as evangelism by those who loved Groove.

2. By 2004-5 when MS was taking over Groove, the most important target was getting Groove Office 12 compliant - they gave up a lot including some tools that just couldnt make the deadline, but they gained a multi lingual platform and the branding / bundling benefits of MS Office. Once again Ray / MS decided not to promote groove seperately and widely as there was little awareness within MS itself of it's capabilities and no enhanced support structure in place. Now every week new teams at MS are adopting Groove as their preferred way of working and the word is spreading.

3. But the most significant reason is that people never talk of a product that is proving to be strategically useful to them. Real story - at a recent talk i gave to the top 50 CIOs in India, i asked about Groove and no hands went up. I knew the the MD of xzxzxzx Pharmaceutical company in the first row and pointed out that his company did use Groove, internationally. I got such a dirty look :-)

Later over drinks he came and clarified - he said Groove has had such a major impact on their efficiency and costs at xzxzxzxzx pharma, that if his CIO colleagues wanted to remain blind to it, he was surely not going to be the one to enlighten them - his company would shoot him.

Groove is not a toy or just some file sharing tool for large files only - it is the closest you can come to a real time paperless office and it's impact on any organisation is phenomenal.