Management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, “since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to ‘The Enterprise’, call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!”

To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

“Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from ‘unchecked’ to ‘checked’, and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review.”

Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you’d want to talk to, anyway

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don’t solve an actual problem.

Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn’t make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove’s designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of “Chief Software Architect” at Microsoft…

Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time. And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him.

Buying a company that makes shit that nobody cares about—nobody you’d want to talk to, anyway—just so you can replace your product leadership and vision with theirs and so that you can stop building your products that people actually care about and start building shit that nobody will care about…

Still bad.