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The Segway Of Software

Let me be utterly clear about this, so there is no lingering confusion in anyone’s mind…

Groove has to be the worst software I’ve ever used in my life.

For something else that was breathlessly touted as a revolution with no downside for so long, I’m amazed that I haven’t yet put my fist through the screen when using it.

Forget the performance hit on an individual machine…

Forget the laggy response…

Groove has the most idiotic user interface seen since cc:Mail.

To top it off, this supposed wunderkind of collaboration, this pinnacle of a more modern way to get stuff done, this enabler of all things great and integrated…

This thing totally sucks at handling the group part of collaboration. Which is the only part of collaboration that makes it collaborative, to be quite honest.

Hey, got 2 folks with similar names? You gotta resolve the conflict manually! How do you do that? Your guess is as good as mine. Which is about the extent of what Groove can explain you need to do.

You want to know who raves about Groove?

Microsofties. And ‘softie wannabes, hangers-on, and nearly everything in-between.

But the fact is that Groove is like the autistic cousin of SharePoint. Now, this is not to insult folks who have autism at all.

Groove’s interface imposes these totally random and arbitrary restrictions on collaboration and communication because you can’t see what’s going on in ways that would actually be helpful, but you can see things that are totally useless. That’s the closest analogy to autism I can think of. Maybe MS should use Groove as a training tool, to drive funding for autism research.

Why do I care where people are at any given time in Groove? This isn’t kindergarten. We don’t have to get in a line and all walk to the bathroom at the same time any more.

While working in Groove, I find myself having to make a conscious decision to ignore all the stuff that is going on in a Groove workspace. That’s not productivity, folks. That’s schizophrenia.

So why does Groove put such an emphasis on what someone else is doing?

I’ll tell you why.

For all its touted collaborative prowess…that’s the one thing above all else Groove stinks at most. Groove’s basically the unholy offspring of a crappy chat client that mated with a P2P transfer engine created by someone with the last name of Frankenstein.

If you don’t know what other people are doing in a Groove workspace, then you don’t know what you have to avoid opening, for fear of your changes getting lost, or split, when a document is open by more than 1 person at a time.

But the final nails in Groove’s coffin should be these 2 simple facts…

• Groove offers no mobile client whatsoever
• Groove offers no connectivity/sychronization with Outlook

Because of those unforgiveable omissions, except for a very very narrow subset of the populace whose paychecks come from Redmond, Groove is totally unusable for anything meaningful. And even then, there are much better alternatives. Stuff that actually lets you get things done.

I’m surprised at the number of folks who, as professionals, should care about the simple and crucial idea of productivity being at the heart of system design…

But in the name of tech-machismo, ignore it anyway.

|| posted by chris under clueless, kma, opinion, rant, thumbs down || || ||