Ray Ozzie: The wizard of P2P
Since leaving the employ of IBM -- he worked at the Iris Associates division at Lotus, which had been swallowed by Big Blue in 1995 -- Ozzie has been tight as a clam about his new super-secret company called Groove Networks. But in the last few weeks, there have been more sightings of the Oz than of Elvis.
In August, he appeared at the Intel Developer's Forum to participate in -- drumroll, please -- a panel about peer-to-peer. Then he popped up a couple of weeks ago at a P2P conference at the University of San Francisco organized by Tim O'Reilly (one of the more intelligent voices guiding the industry conversation about the future of this nascent technology).
And then he sat down for an open-the-kimono conversation with Dan Bricklin, his old boss from Software Arts, who subsequently published a brief teaser about the meeting on his Web page.
Word around town is that the Oz will use Internet World in late October as the venue to let the rest of the world know what he and his band of co-conspirators have been up to -- and P2P will loom large in the announcement.
Rest assured, he and his team haven't been developing another simple file sharing application a la Napster. So what might he be working on?
If history provides any clue, remember that Notes was initially perceived as an application before it morphed into a defining client/server platform along with PowerBuilder.
The browser followed a similar metamorphosis from simply being a hot application to becoming a development environment and then reached the current stage where we live in an e-business world, and Web computing has become the business environment.
It's too early to say with any confidence whether P2P will follow the same historical line. But it has already undergone a big transformation from the early part of the last decade when it was the driving idea behind Windows for Workgroups, for example -- the notion that all machines were peers and were symmetric producers and consumers of information. WFW flopped, but you have to wonder how it might have fared had there already been in place a global, universal communications network as advanced as today's Internet.
More recently, P2P has been accompanied by more than a small degree of hype, most of it generated by the Napster controversy. But if you thought Java and "push" were oversold, wait and see what happens to P2P after the re-emergence of Ray Ozzie. Does the name Barnum & Bailey ring a bell?
Still, there's real steak behind the sizzle, and if Ray Ozzie's name recognition causes a stir around P2P, that's all to the good.
Advocates know that this thing -- however it develops -- presents a keen challenge to the status quo architecture that governs most Internet services. When it comes to realizing the potential of this technology, they also know that Napster and simple file sharing make up only the tip of the iceberg.