I’m a Mac user, having given up on Windows almost exactly two years ago and never looked back. Oh, how I wish that were completely true.
The dirty little secret is that up until a few weeks ago, I need to continue to run Windows (under Virtual PC on my Mac) mostly to use a piece of collaboration software – called Groove – that we had come to depend upon. Oh, how I wish that were completely true.
The other dirty little secret is that I’ve also needed to run Windows to be able to use Intuit’s Quickbooks Online – which, most unfortunately, was written to require Windows and Internet Explorer as a result of its use of an unfortunate technology, ActiveX. One of these days Intuit might get with the program and shed such an unfortunate technical dependency, what with AJAX and all.
Anyway, Microsoft bought Groove a while back, picking up now CTO Ray Ozzie in the process. For a number of reasons, we concluded earlier this year that it was time to abandon Groove, a thick client in every meaning of that word and way too thick for us. We moved to it in a terribly weak moment a couple of years back. Basically, all we need is a nifty cross-platform file sharing mechanism and we thought we’d found that in FolderShare.
So what happened today? Microsoft bought FolderShare, saying how it was going to become a part of Windows Live. Jeez, just what we’ve been waiting for.
Anybody out there interested in starting another cross-platform file sharing company? I suspect we’ll be looking for a new home relatively soon. Or, maybe I can just sign up for Flickr Pro and just make my files look like JPEG’s instead? Or, wait for GoogleBase?
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