Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks, rarely posts to his blog these days. When he does, I’m sure lots of people pay attention, as I do — one more reason RSS as a mechanism for distributed attention is helpful. After all, who has time to check a site that changes erratically? Most of us can barely keep up with sites that change regularly/constantly. Anyway, most of Ozzie’s posts nowadays seem to tie to corporate events, while making a larger point. Fair enough. I care very little about Groove, having (a) never tried it seriously and (b) not wanting to commit to a single platform tool which is, itself, somewhat of a platform. But Ozzie has a track record of being ahead of the curve, and so I read for nuggets of interest.
Today, in conjunction with the imminent release of Groove 3.0, he writes about extreme mobility and its effect on the workplace. He looks at the confluence of recent technologies (laptops, broadband, WiFi, etc.) and points out that the flow of work continues to decentralize.
I’ve been thinking about a subset of that changing flow… information. RSS is accelerating the explosion of information into its constituent parts (ideas! facts! not necessarily mixed well…). Combined with mobility, things are changing. To me, mobility is more about multiple devices in a few fixed locations, than myriad locations. If I can move seamlessly between home and office without disrupting the flow of work and without needing to carry my laptop with me to do it, that’s a game-changer. I’ve commented once or twice before about the complexities of working with just two machines at home. Anything beyond a single repository invites complexity, which is a hurdle. And a lazy world hates hurdles. RSS has its adoption hurdles, too, but they are of a different (lower) level of magnitude. To come full circle, I always wonder if Groove benefits the individual along this axis (simplicity) without requiring full-bore commitment. Not really a driving concern for me to investigate right now, but maybe something to return to. There are also a few links which look interesting in Ozzie’s post, including one to a PowerPoint (I hate downloading stuff like this).