Ray Ozzie: OSes still matter

Ray Ozzie, the father of Lotus Notes and now the father of Groove, spent some time recently discussing why Groove only ships in a Windows version, unlike Notes, which came in versions for almost every OS under the sun:

In the first five years of Notes, we built about a half million lines of (C) code, having to write a ton of junk from scratch e.g. custom memory managers, code component managers that did all sorts of trickery for memory conservation, multi-byte character handling, rich text editing, MDI window handling, and all sorts of grunge - because it was early, and we were based on a fairly basic OS, there was little code around to re-use. We then ultimately spent years and millions of dollars porting Notes to the Mac, to OS/2, to Open Look and Motif, to Solaris, to the AS/400 and the 370, to ... well, you name it. Yes - it was worth it at the time - but the "drag" that this porting effort had on our organization was ultimately staggering; there was no way that we could do releases in anything less than two-to-three years. It contributed significantly to slower innovation.

In the first (nearly) five years of Groove, by concentrating for the present on a single platform, and by leveraging everything that we can possibly get our hands on, by embracing new processes that wouldn't have been possible without a sophisticated development environment, we've built about four and a half million lines of (C++) code and continue to deliver new feature releases quarterly, leveraging powerful tools, componentry bundled with the rich layers of code beneath us sometimes referred to as an OS, having both leveraged (the reasonably licensed IBM unicode libraries) and contributed (crypto++) open source code - again, purely for leverage and to help others leverage what we've done. From where I've come, it's truly breathtaking in so many dimensions, and the product could never be where it is without standing on the shoulders of giants - particularly Microsoft.

Contact Online Executive Editor Adam Gaffin

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