Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study

Ray Ozzie

(Founder, Iris Associates and Groove Networks)

Ray Ozzie founded a two startup company which is Iris Associates and Groove Networks. Ozzie works in PLATO Notes, one of the earliest collaboration applications. In working there he also want to develop collaboration software of his own but couldn’t find funding. But Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs decided to invest to Ozzie’s idea, which would become Lotus Notes, after he led the development of Lotus Symphony, that’s why Lotus was the first widely used collaboration software. Ozzie founded Iris Associates in 1984 to develop the product for Lotus, while he founded Groove Networks which built Internet-Based workgroup collaboration software.

The first thing that they’ve coded in the Groove was a primitive version of their own synchronization algorithm, which they’ve worked in the house of Ozzie. Then a few weeks later they’ve moved to an office space and after months Ken Moore joined their team, a former Iris Engineer. The common thing about Iris and groove was the need of users or their potential customers for the product and not based on technology. Ozzie have his perspective based on an intention a hole in the market or the future hole in the market and not building a cool piece of technology and see where it goes

They want to use notes as communication tools and it will be using computers on their desktops, this when PC’s where just emerging as spreadsheet tools and word processing replacements. He wrote the specs for it that is base on the system called PLATO which was a large-scale of interactive system that people did learning.

In Groove the nature of work was changing technology, it is a big help for people in their work. They saw a lot of frustration because some of their tried to deploy systems across enterprise. So they come up with a conclusion that they need to build a system that just worked instantly right after downloading, for end users.

The web itself on the open internet is an alternative way of doing this, because in the work environment now increasingly you have to work with partners or customers directly. Before Ozzie start a company he writes a couple of founding documents. The first they did in both Iris and Groove was to get a bog office. But they have a problem, where do they want to do the algorithm, In C++ or in Java. At first they’ve decided to do it in Java but they conclude that there would never be a stable runtime environment that they could count on , on all desktop PCs so they’ve end up in using C++

They’ve thought that going to market would be lot easier but they were wrong, going out of the market was a challenge for them.

The three things I’ve learned about Ozzie were, first learn about leadership from the people at the top of the company. Watch how they talk to people, hoe they present to people because from that you will be able to know how to handle a company. Second, learn about the kinds of culture that you want to create I your own company based on the point and negative aspects. Third is to respect and appreciate other people skill because you need a help of someone when you’re doing a startup.