Interesting Old Ray Ozzie Interview | September 9, 2006
by Jeb Boniakowski
I just reread this interesting interview with Proto Hero Ray Ozzie. My favorite part is this:
The same edge-versus-center tension has happened in the realm of business solutions. The greatest amount of value that Lotus Notes ever provided, besides the email infrastructure, was as a rapid application development platform that people at the edge of the organization - in a business unit - could use to whip up an application that solved their problem instantly. Just-in-time, disposable solutions. As Notes was more embraced as central infrastructure, IT buyers demanded that end-user design capabilities be re-shaped to target the needs of professional developers. Notes environments became "locked down", and people closest to the needs lost their ability to do "self-service" solution development. With Groove, we've brought that back.
Naturally, that's an idea that's pretty near to our hearts. Groove, as far as we can tell, is focused primarily on document collaboration, which is a little different than what we do, but our mission is close towhat Ozzie describes: give the people who are not professional programmers the ability whip up these "situational applications" when the need comes up. On the topic of terms like "situational applications", Byron's previous post discussed some of the confusion surrounding names for these tools. It's interesting to search Technorati to try to gauge the relative popularity of the terms. Composite applications seems to be beating out even the venerable enterprise mashups right now. This inevitably leads to all sorts of other neologisms like mashboard.
