It comes as no surprise to see that Microsoft has announced its intention to acquire Groove. Around the time I wrote Groove v3.0: A Tool For Our Times, I came to understand that Groove was the perfect client to integrate with Sharepoint, and they had built very strong relationships into that part of Microsoft. At the same time, there has been a lot of political struggle in the various groups playing in collaboration land at Microsoft -- the Exchange folks, the Live Communications Server folks, teh Sharepoint team, and the Placeware people -- and bringing Ray Ozzie aboard as CTO will quickly lead to a clarification of who is the architect for Microsoft's direction in social and collaboration tools, and I guess everything else: it will be Ray.