Jazzed About Work

Ray Ozzie hunches over his Sony Vaio Picturebook, oblivious to the cattail marshes that fan out just beyond his corner office, in Beverly, Massachusetts. He fires up the machine, which is connected to a wireless local-area network, and gets to work. For the next two hours, he will not leave his computer. But he will not be working alone.

He needs to meet with an ad hoc group that includes members of his product-design team, along with managers from a large client company. If this group had a typical working arrangement, Ozzie would launch a round-robin of emails, asking members when and where they could get together. Instead, he works with them now -- in real time.

He moves his cursor across the screen and clicks on a square labeled "Enterprise Management Design Space." That square is a shared virtual work space. He types his comments into it, and those remarks appear instantly on every computing device used by every member of the group. He can bring other tools to the task, such as a browser, a chat window, or a sketch pad. He can work simultaneously with the others, or he can go offline and work on his own. If he goes offline, the work space will be automatically updated as soon as he comes back online.

Ozzie, the programming wizard who oversaw the creation of Lotus Notes, is using Groove -- a new platform for direct, person-to-person computing that was launched last October by Groove Networks Inc., a company that he founded in 1997. Like the file-sharing system popularized by Napster, Groove employs a peer-to-peer approach to computing. It lets people establish a virtual space and then invite others to "groove" with them there.

But unlike Napster -- or, for that matter, Lotus Notes -- Groove circumvents centralized computer infrastructure and allows PCs to talk to one another directly. "Groove works like a jazz band," says Ozzie, who keeps a framed poster of saxophonist Eric Dolphy outside his office door. "It's intended for people who want to get together and jam -- to interact and improvise with each other."

Ozzie, 45, has an unlined face and hair the color of chrome. For someone who has recently weathered more than three years of self-imposed isolation -- he and his team essentially went underground to develop Groove -- he looks remarkably unburdened. And, at least on this winter day, he displays an appealing ratio of IQ to ego.

But Ozzie is not a man of humble ambition -- far from it. Building a Notes or a Groove is a high-stakes game of big bets and daring calls. Long before it became a reality, he envisioned a day when PCs would be wired together and millions of people would leverage them as tools for working together. By helping to transform cyberspace into a workplace, he has done as much as anyone to change the way we communicate and collaborate.

In an interview with Fast Company, Ozzie offered several lessons on how people can use technology to work together well -- and on how they can work together to create great technology. Every interview is a kind of collaboration. This interview, involving a master of collaboration, was no exception.

To learn how to work together, watch how kids play together. Around 1997, I began to think about how we might create a virtual, private application network. If you and I work for different organizations but we're working together, we should be able to connect easily and seamlessly in a secure, contained environment -- that is, a network that brings together the right people, the right information, and the right tools, all at the right time. Or, to put it another way: If people are going to use computer technologies to augment their interactions, those technologies need to have the directness and spontaneity of a phone call, the visual immediacy of a fax, the asynchrony of email, and the privacy of a closed-door meeting.

All of this started to crystallize for me one night, when I came home and found my son playing a modified capture-the-flag version of Quake. He and his friends had actually designed their own virtual environment: They could look up, look down, look left, look right. They could jump up and grab the flag. They could even talk to other team members.

I sat there and watched him for a while, and then it hit me that this was his way of communicating. He was socializing with other people by playing this game on the Net. And I realized that those of us in business -- who have so much to gain through effective communication -- were using lame, document-oriented tools. Our own kids were using technology far more effectively than we were! They were operating in an environment where small groups of people can self-organize and interact. And they made me think that I should be able to use technology in the same way.