Hi Steve,
Just curious, where did you get the list of the MVP's you're referring
to as "dead" below? The Groove MVP's I see on Microsoft's site:
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx?product=1&comp....
are all pretty active from what I've seen. Mark, being the "English"
man you'll find doing more English that then others, but all in all you
still see all of them around - or I do/have done.
As always, if you do have problems or difficulties, posting to this
group will be a good start as there are people who have learnt on their
own (from their own mistakes ;-) an can probably share those experiences
or help answer your questions should you have them.
As I'm sure you're aware with any product of Microsoft's over time it
will mature and become a well refined tool, Groove is obviously still in
its infancy being version 1.0 of the Microsoft release really...
Justin
Justin,
The MVP references I used are on the page I referenced.
On the right hand side under the heading
"Groove Centric Blogs"
Pop each of the English speaking links to see that all of those guys
are either doing something else or asleep.
See also the Groove Blog
http://blogs.technet.com/groove/default.aspx
Visiting that is like shopping at K-Mart. The absence of energy is
stultifying. I took the advice of Matt and Abbot at the bottom of
their essay "Solution Development in Groove 2007" on the page and sent
them some comments a few months ago when it was still fresh. Those
disappeared down into a black hole. I never heard back from anybody.
Here's the thing. I'm a quant modeler among things (very
sophisticated stuff beyond Excel). And over the years I've come to
understand the resistance points of the average manager or analyst to
software complexity. With Excel, it's the 90/10 rule. I.e., 90% of
the users are only going to use 10% of the capability. And especially
for a manager, I know that he/she will have a very low frustration
tolerance for learning new things not directly in her decision stream.
That said, the existing Groove Forms design interface is absolutely
not something that the average manager or analyst will take the time
to understand. That very important product component is DOA in usage
terms. I complained about that in my now phantom memo. Regardless of
where my feedback may be floating in the electronic ether right now,
the fact still holds true. Customizing Groove is too complicated and
it never should have been released without a library of relevant
templates.
And where MS is really on the wrong planet is with their hush-hush
attitude about product development. I recently began playing with an
absolutely delightful open source product called TiddlyWiki. There is
a small cabal of TW developers just blasting out great plug-ins every
day. You think those guys stop for a second to ponder what MS is
planning?
It won't be long until I will be able to cobble together a Groove-like
product using an architecture of Tiddly core and selected plug-ins.
And do that with maybe 100 lines of code to make it bullet proof. And
the UI will be much cleaner, much sexier and much more fun.
To further stuff MS into its Not Invented Here cave in Redmond,
auxiliary open source tools (yes even MS can use them), like jQuery
and the phantasmagorical Flare visualization components can be
incorporated into application design with little effort. Again, who
needs MS for what? All MS can provide the creative communities
outside its domain is bloat they have no interest in. BTW, here's a
link to the Flare demo:
http://flare.prefuse.org/demo
Let me acknowledge out of the box, the very creative but very anarchic
indiscipline that exits in open source. So I'm not suggesting that as
a business model for MS. But that kind of plug-in centric real-time
energy should be the mind-set nonetheless. Although the shiny but
sclerotic Redmond-Oz probably precludes that from happening.
MS even messed up in their solution strategy to sclerotic
minimization. They should have used Big Pharma which is also shiny
and sclerotic as the business model. Pharma saw itself drained so
began acquiring smaller more agile R&D shops. But then mostly LEFT
THEM ALONE. But not MS. It bought interesting technologies like
Groove with agile, vibrant development teams and then promptly tried
to integrate them into it's "6 GB RAM minimum" ossified architecture.
I.e. The Vista metastasized Christmas tree on which RAM voracious
ornaments of needless complexity are hung. Rather than a pleasant
"holiday" experience" the user now encounters a surreal Tannenbaum
tilted and wavering in and out of CPU paralysis or outright BSOD.
BTW, my "favorite" Excel 2007 function is Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
I just saw an MS TV commercial last night "starring" Bill Gates and
Jerry Seinfeld. Sorry, those guys are 90's dot.bomb celebrities.
Totally played. The Apple guy who probably lives in an 800 square
foot walk-up in NYC, crushes Gates message-wise, even as Bill sashays
with Jerry back to his 40,000 sq ft monument to himself.
SteveM
P.S. I'm temperamentally sardonic. That's just an affectation that
camouflages a genuine open mind. So please tell me where I am
wrong.
