Jazzed About Work

Bring people together -- and then set them apart. When I was at Lotus, I found that success could be a huge distraction. People were being pulled in 10 different directions, and those of us on the development team just couldn't focus on our jobs. The only way that we could execute on a reasonable schedule was to get away, both physically and psychologically. So we opened an office an hour away from Lotus headquarters. It had just one room, with a bunch of folding tables, computers, and whiteboards. We went there and did what we had to do.

We created the same kind of environment at Groove: one room, one mission, one goal. We eliminated all interruptions -- to the point where I was really annoyed that there were no interruptions! There was just that one thing that we had to do, and there were just those same ugly faces that we had to look at every day. But isolating our core development team worked really, really well.

During the three years that it took to develop Groove, we also worked in total secrecy. Some people have said that working in stealth was a clever marketing ploy -- a way to build mystique for the product. They're dead wrong. We had no choice: If people at Microsoft had known what we were working on, they would have initiated their own project, and maybe other companies would have done the same thing.

To adapt fast, build slow. A lot of the technology decisions that we made at Groove were based on a belief that if we succeeded, this thing would get bigger and bigger: There would be more and more customer requirements, and we needed to keep this thing from crumbling under its own weight. Otherwise, we would give our competitors a huge opening. But that approach assumes that you're building something for the long run.

During the dotcom era, the dominant belief was that you shouldn't try to create things of value, because by the time you build them, they're obsolete. The mantra was "Build it quick. Turn it around fast." When we started to work on Groove, at the height of the dotcom frenzy, there were days when I wondered, Has the world really changed, or do things still fall at 32 feet per second? Has my gray hair finally become a liability?

For example, in 1995, the Netscape IPO signaled to the world that the rules had changed: The two-year software-development cycle was obsolete; companies needed to develop new product every two quarters; everything would now run on Internet time. But Netscape learned -- in fact, we all learned -- that even though the business climate has changed, you still need to build technology that's sustainable. At one point, people at Netscape found that their code base had grown so large that they couldn't enhance it in a certain way. It needed a major rewrite. The result was a great piece of code, but the rewrite basically cost Netscape its market lead to Microsoft.

If you design a system that can't be readily enhanced, you give your competitors a big market opportunity -- a big window that they can just step through. Quick refinement is a big deal. But you can't build an infrastructure for rapid application development in a rapid manner. Before you can sprint, you have to take that long march.

To see the future, look to the past. I have a deep, abiding passion for using technology to augment relationships. That passion goes back to my undergraduate years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I stumbled onto a project called PLATO -- an acronym for "programmed logic for automated teaching operations."

PLATO consisted of about 1,000 terminals, all connected to a centralized Control Data mainframe computer. The Urbana-Champaign campus had about half of those terminals, and the rest were scattered among major universities throughout the world. As programmers started to use the system, they built into it tools that we now think of as email, conferencing, and even interactive gaming.

Thanks to PLATO, I established relationships with people I had never met face-to-face. We communicated through something called Talk-o-matic -- a kind of online, interactive chat. As one person typed, each character would appear on another person's terminal. I vividly recall having a working online partnership with this one guy that lasted for at least a year. When I finally met him, I found out that he was a quadriplegic. He typed by holding a stick in his mouth -- and I'd thought that he was just a lousy typist.

That was a big moment in my life, because I was communicating mind-to-mind with this guy, and the technology was acting like power steering: It was augmenting our interpersonal, human communication in a way that I could not have imagined. Soon after I left college and moved east, I realized that the rest of the computing world just didn't get it. But I was lucky, because I had seen the endgame. And the endgame was the user experience on PLATO. In a sense, I've spent the rest of my life trying to reinvent it.

Bill Breen (bbreen@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Contact Ray Ozzie by email (rozzie@groove.net), or visit Groove Networks Inc. on the Web (www.groove.net).