Microsoft Gets Groovy, Ozzie
from the surprise,-surprise dept
Considering Bill Gates’ tendency to gush over how brilliant Ray Ozzie is on a regular basis, and the fact that Microsoft invested a huge chunk of change into Groove Networks, it isn’t really a surprise that they’ve now bought the whole thing and named Ozzie Microsoft’s new CTO. In fact, some people have been predicting this deal for for the past four years. With all the various “Groove-lite” projects that have shown up over the past few months (Grouper, iMeem, QNext, etc…), it looks like there’s some new interest in this area, even if Groove never took off to quite the level expected by the hype that surrounded it initially.
Comments on “Microsoft Gets Groovy, Ozzie”
The unintend irony
The unintended irony is that I bet this will put a significant chunk of change in Mitch Kapor’s pocket, since he was long-time friend of Ray Ozzies’ and early board member at Groove. Now of course Mitch is funding the Open Source Application Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation — so indirectly billg will help fund some of the most prominent open source apps.
Still, Ray is a really sharp guy and will up the innovation IQ significantly at MS.