Our company uses Placeware‘s intenet collaboration and conferencing software for many of our meetings, as well as providing Placeware hosting services for a number of our clients. It’s a decent piece of software, allowing, for instance, Guy and I to present a demonstration of blogging to our department. Guy connected to the meeting from his home in the UK, I sat with a team in Baltimore, Maryland, a group of people from our Florida office joined in, as did a few people from a remote office in Connecticut. Taking turns at the controls, Guy and I created blog entries, searched Google, reeled off bullet points from a (yeccch) Powerpoint presentation, and just generally underwhelmed our audience. It works well and pretty reliably, and when you (inevitably) get kicked off by some network hiccup, it’s very easy to log on again and pick up where you left off.
Seems Microsoft wants to use Placeware, too. They announced today that they are purchasing the company, and integrating it into their Information Worker division, home of MS Office. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft integrates this into the Office applications: will it supplant NetMeeting? How ill it affect Microsoft’s relationship with Groove?
The most interesting aspect of the announcement was unmentioned: Placeware Conference Center is written entirely in Java. Will Microsoft rewrite the program in C#? Does the timing of this announcement have anything to do with U.S. District Court Judge Frederick Motz’s order that Microsoft begin distributing Sun’s version of the Java Virtual Machine within 120 days of February 4, 2003?
When it comes to Microsoft, I doubt if anything is a coincidence.