Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early

Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early(reproof.app)

39 points by maguay 5 days ago | 30 comments

I worked on both Lotus Notes and Groove. What's great about Ray is that he has the capacity and drive to be involved in every part of the project. He drove high-level business requirements and wrote code and also cared about icons and colors. But he did it all without arrogance and allowed his team to argue back when necessary.

In case anyone is interested, a while back I wrote about another Ray Ozzie project: Live Mesh: https://gridwhale.medium.com/live-mesh-and-the-future-of-com...

w0rd-driven 3 days ago | |

Thank you for that story and thank you for your contribution. I remember Live Mesh vividly and admit I found parts of it awkward. The functionality I used the most and thought was far ahead of its time was the ability to use Remote Desktop with any computer in the mesh. I often controlled my home computer from work.

While it was technically possible to use a dynamic dns + insecurely forward the RDP ports, LM mostly just worked(tm). It's possible to do this today as securely with something like Tailscale but Live Mesh included all of the batteries and none of the headache. RIP Live Mesh. Thanks again

GMoromisato 2 days ago | | |

I appreciate this--thanks!

Yes, I think the Tailscale-style connectivity was a big benefit of Live Mesh; I wish we had pushed it further.

anonymars 2 days ago | | |

Live Mesh also didn't require you to sync everything to the cloud, in contrast to offerings today. The cloud was just another optional target.

Edit: the best replacement I could find that still exists is "Resilio Sync"

nxc18 2 days ago | |

I was an early adopter of Live Mesh, and thought it was awesome. From the outside, it was mind-boggling that it didn’t gain traction.

You write about it as an idea that has been abandoned, but I think really it is an idea that has become distributed over other systems. iCloud Photos works essentially the same way Live Mesh implemented it. Apps use iCloud as a storage medium with built in backup and sync. Apps are collaborative by default now.

But I suppose I only had my own vision of the product as a user, maybe your aspirations go further.

GMoromisato 2 days ago | | |

You're absolutely right that all apps have evolved in the same direction, not necessarily because they were inspired by Live Mesh, but mostly because it's a pretty obvious/useful direction.

I think Live Mesh wanted to be the platform piece of that so that (e.g.,) iCloud Photos wouldn't have to implement that themselves. Moreover, it would allow users to have a unified management of the distributed system instead of dealing with each app separately. That's the part I miss.

weinzierl 3 days ago |

This was an enjoyable read. Especially the idea of someone living and creating between eras resonates with me.

I've seen and played with Lotus but I'm too young to have worked in any environment where it was the primary communication tool.

Still, my take away from OP is that Ozzied strived for Lotus to be much more than an email client.

Lotus makes much more sense as an attempt to bring the collaborative features of a shared university computer system with email, chat, forums, shared documents and applications to an ordinary networked PC like environment.

Something bigger than a weird email client.

danielovichdk 2 days ago |

Ray was, and probably stille is, a great architect and programmer.

He made us younger Microsoft employees feel like there was room for technical people in the top of the company.

Microsoft was actually always good at that. They know how to treat their people right

kjellsbells 2 days ago |

This really stood out to me:

> products like Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, they enabled the domain practitioner to potentially solve problems themselves. They’re democratized problem solving. A real estate officer or a plumber can solve their needs without having to involve third parties and explain to them the need

That may be true for people who have the freedom of action to craft and use their own solutions. It reminds me of the explosion in domain apps unleashed by Visual Basic.

It is not true for your average office jockey or line employee stuck using some line of business apps, and where access to powerful tools is not allowed or is even banned. Billy in Accounts can't fire up Claude even if he wanted to, and running Ollama on his work machine is a fireable offense. IT control precisely what can run on their hardware, after all. So he won't ever be able to finally fix those TPS reports even if he is the one guy with the knowledge to do so.

I'm not arguing that this isn't sound IT policy, but I do expect a fair bit of shadow IT to spring up when people internalize that keeping their job requires them to show massive AI powered productivity gains.

gorfian_robot 3 days ago |

I still miss Groove.

adityaathalye 2 days ago | |

So much this. It was a great piece of software that was once super useful to me... 'twas circa 2010. I was a wee project manager at a small marketing + design agency in Goa---emailing "big" files (via relatively anaemic broadband) was our bread and butter; raw images, multimedia, Adobe, Corel, MS Office stuff.

One day, I tried to demo Groove in our weekly company-wide morning show-and-tells.

I had a few of our "usual suspect" files synced between my laptop, and another computer upstairs. And then I tried to show how I was making edits on one computer, then (dramatically) running up to the other one, and doing something else, or undoing / overwriting the previous edit.

The magical-to-me seamless, and fast updates didn't make much of an impression on the crowd. Perhaps all the huffing and puffing was not the best look while trying to sell something that was supposed to make everyone's life easier :,)

Anyway, I kept using it and was so hopping mad when it got "embraced, absorbed, and extinguished". Software that "just works" and works really well is such a rare thing.

gorfian_robot 2 days ago | | |

and now we have sharepoint.

jimkleiber 2 days ago | |

I wonder if in the age of AI it's a lot easier to resurrect old software that we miss. Not easy, but a lot easier?

andsoitis 3 days ago |

> Because polish is in the eye of the beholder

Polish is also a matter of taste and expertise.

pseudohadamard 2 days ago | |

And a lot of practice until you can say even the simplest things. And then you need to take night classes to be able to work with Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.

andsoitis 2 days ago | | |

> And a lot of practice until you can say even the simplest things.

simplicity requires taste and effort.

adityaathalye 2 days ago | |

As a Lisp-affine person, I could not agree more.

recursivedoubts 3 days ago |

why is there no scroll bar in this article?

maguay 14 hours ago | |

Author here, yikes, sorry about that. Going to go get that fixed.

SeriousM 3 days ago | |

Yes, horrible experience..

pseudohadamard 2 days ago | | |

If you look at the right-hand side of your keyboard you'll see a key called "PgDn". You may use this to scroll through the article. Or, if you're using a fondle slab, just swipe to scroll.

You're welcome.