Are the Groove Designers Architecture Astronauts?
George Moromisato at Groove Networks writes: I read “Joel on Software” more or less religiously and I’m always intrigued by your insights. Your column on Architecture Astronauts was no different, except for your dismissal of Groove as software that “miss[ed] the point” of Napster’s example. I hope to take a few moments of your time to convince you to give Groove another chance. Like Napster, we also consider peer-to-peer to be a means to an end, not the end in itself. For Groove, the end goal is not to search for music on the Internet (as cool as that is); Groove’s end goal is to allow people to interact and share information on the Internet without regards to time, distance, or corporate infrastructure. The last point is worth diving on: Today, if I want to share information with someone outside my corporate infrastructure I have three plausible choices: 1) use email, which is not very interactive, has very little persistence, and is often insecure; 2) use an internal web server, whic