Groovy. I'm playing with Groove again, and I must say I really like a lot of things about it. (When I tried the initial release, I was not particularly impressed—at least with the UI.) Its Windows-only limitation is a major bummer, though. It's really unfortunate to have a collaboration tool tied to a specific platform. For single-user tools, it's not as bad. But for collaboration tools, if you have a single person on a workteam who uses a different platform, they make it pretty much impossible for the team to dedicate itself to the tool. So, while 95% (or whatever) of people may use Windows, the percentage of entire workteams who only use Windows is a far lower number. Of course, the Groove people are aware of this, and I'd be surprised if they didn't do anything about it (even though they are clearly focused on the enterprise market, where it may matter a little less). For instance here's a message in their user forum: "Just wanted to let you know that we are listening to your request for Mac (and other platform) clients. Until we've got one, you can consider running an emulator, such as Virtual PC 3.0." Until we've got one? Hmmm...

Update: Stu Lancaster pointed me to a Groove press release from a year ago that says, "A Linux version of Groove is in development." And, since we haven't heard anything since, wonders if the Microsoft Groove investment may have changed that.

And furthermore: This Boston Globe column asks, "Can Groove Networks survive a $50 million investment/ bear hug from Microsoft? Or will Ray Ozzie's latest venture, devoted to improving collaboration and communications, become nothing more than a feature of Windows XP?: ... 'The deal makes Ray a contract programmer to Microsoft,' says someone who knows Ozzie. 'Microsoft gets to take 80 percent of what he's got and put it in their operating system, and Ray can try and sell the 20 percent that's left over.'" Ugh. <via scripting>