The Rise of Groupware

These days, computer users take collaboration software for granted. Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and so on, are such a big part of many people’s daily lives that they hardly notice them. But they are the outgrowth of years of hard work done before the Internet became a thing, when there was a thorny problem: How could people collaborate effectively when everyone’s using a stand-alone personal computer?

The answer was groupware, an early term for collaboration software designed to work across multiple computers attached to a network. At first, those computers were located in the same office, but the range of operation slowly expanded from there, forming the highly collaborative networked world of today. This post will trace some of this history, starting from early ideas formed at Stanford Research Institute by the team of famed computer pioneer Douglas Englebart, to a smaller company, Lotus, that hit the market with its groupware program, Notes, at the right time, to Microsoft’s ill-fated attempt to enter the groupware market, including never before seen footage of Bill Gates on Broadway.

In the early days of the computing era, when IBM’s PC reigned supreme, collaboration was difficult. Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

How the PC made us forget about collaboration for a while

Imagine that it’s the early-to-mid-1980s and that you run a large company. You’ve invested a lot of money into personal computers, which your employees are now using—IBM PCs, Apple Macintoshes, clones, and the like. There’s just one problem: You have a bunch of computers, but they don’t talk to one another.

If you’re in a small office and need to share a file, it’s no big deal: You can just hand a floppy disk off to someone on the other side of the room. But what if you’re part of an enterprise company and the person you need to collaborate with is on the other side of the country? Passing your colleague a disk doesn’t work.

The new personal-computing technologies clearly needed to do more to foster collaboration. They needed to be able to take input from a large group of people inside an office, to allow files to be shared and distributed, and to let multiple users tweak and mash information with everyone being able to sign off on the final version.

The hardware that would enable such collaboration software, or “groupware” as it tended to be called early on, varied by era. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was usually a mainframe-to-terminal setup, rather than something using PCs. Later, in the 1980s, it was either a token ring or Ethernet network, which were competing local-networking technologies. But regardless of the hardware used for networking, the software for collaboration needed to be developed.

Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart is sometimes called “the father of groupware.”Getty Images

Some of the basic ideas behind groupware were first forged at the Stanford Research Institute by a Douglas Englebart–led team, in the 1960s, working on what they called an oN-Line System (NLS). An early version of NLS was presented in 1968 during what became known as the “Mother of All Demos.” It was essentially a coming-out party for many computing innovations that would eventually become commonplace. If you have 90 minutes and want to see something 20-plus years ahead of its time, watch this video.

In the years that followed, on top of well-known innovations like the mouse, Englebart’s team developed tools that anticipated groupware, including an “ information center,” an early precursor of the server in a client-server architecture, and tracking edits made to text files by different people, an early precursor of version control.

By the late 1980s, at a point when the PC had begun to dominate the workplace, Engelbart was less impressed with what had been gained than with what had been lost in the process. He wrote (with Harvey Lehtman) in Byte magazine in 1988:

The emergence of the personal computer as a major presence in the 1970s and 1980s led to tremendous increases in personal productivity and creativity. It also caused setbacks in the development of tools aimed at increasing organizational effectiveness—tools developed on the older time-sharing systems.
To some extent, the personal computer was a reaction to the overloaded and frustrating time-sharing systems of the day. In emphasizing the power of the individual, the personal computer revolution turned its back on those tools that led to the empowering of both co-located and distributed work groups collaborating simultaneously and over time on common knowledge work.
The introduction of local- and wide-area networks into the personal computer environment and the development of mail systems are leading toward some of the directions explored on the earlier systems. However, some of the experiences of those earlier pioneering systems should be considered anew in evolving newer collaborative environments.

Back to top

Groupware comes of age

Groupware finally started to catch on in the late 1980s, with tech companies putting considerable resources into developing collaboration software—perhaps taken in by the idea of “orchestrating work teams,” as an Infoworld piece characterized the challenge in 1988. The San Francisco Examiner reported, for example, that General Motors had invested in the technology, and was beginning to require its suppliers to accept purchase orders electronically.

Focusing on collaboration software was a great way for independent software companies to stand out, this being an area that large companies— Microsoft in particular—had basically ignored. Today, Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla of collaboration software, thanks to its combination of Teams and Office 365. But it took the tech giant a very long while to get there: Microsoft started taking the market seriously only around 1992.

One company in particular was well-positioned to take advantage of the opening that existed in the 1980s. That was the Lotus Development Corporation, a Cambridge, Mass.–based software company that made its name with its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for IBM PCs.

Lotus did not invent groupware or coin the word—on top of Engelbart’s formative work at Stanford, the term had been around for years before Lotus Notes came on the scene. But it was the company that brought collaboration software to everyone’s attention.

Ray Ozzie [left] was primarily responsible for the development of Lotus Notes, the first popular groupware solution. Left: Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images; Right: James Keyser/Getty Images

The person most associated with the development of Notes was Ray Ozzie, who was recruited to Lotus after spending time working on VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program. Ozzie essentially built out what became Notes while working at Iris Associates, a direct offshoot of Lotus that Ozzie founded to develop the Notes application. After some years of development in stealth mode, the product was released in 1989.

Ozzie explained his inspiration for Notes to Jessica Livingston, who described this history in her book, Founders At Work:

In Notes, it was (and this is hard to imagine because it was a different time) the concept that we’d all be using computers on our desktops, and therefore we might want to use them as communication tools. This was a time when PCs were just emerging as spreadsheet tools and word processing replacements, still available only on a subset of desks, and definitely no networks. It was ’82 when I wrote the specs for it. It had been based on a system called PLATO [Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations] that I’d been exposed to at college, which was a large-scale interactive system that people did learning and interactive gaming on, and things like that. It gave us a little bit of a peek at the future—what it would be like if we all had access to interactive systems and technology.

Building an application based on PLATO turned out to be the right idea at the right time, and it gave Lotus an edge in the market. Notes included email, a calendaring and scheduling tool, an address book, a shared database, and programming capabilities, all in a single front-end application.

Lotus Notes on Computer Chronicles Fall 1989

As an all-in-one platform built for scale, Notes gained a strong reputation as an early example of what today would be called a business-transformation tool, one that managed many elements of collaboration. It was complicated from an IT standpoint and required a significant investment to maintain. In a way, what Notes did that was perhaps most groundbreaking was that it helped turn PCs into something that large companies could readily use.

As Fortune noted in 1994, Lotus had a massive lead in the groupware space, in part because the software worked essentially the same anywhere in a company’s network. We take that for granted now, but back then it was considered magical:

Like Lotus 1-2-3, Notes is easy to customize. A sales organization, for instance, might use it to set up an electronic bulletin board that lets people pool information about prospective clients. If some of the info is confidential, it can be restricted so not everyone can call it up.
Notes makes such homegrown applications and the data they contain accessible throughout an organization. The electronic bulletin board you consult in Singapore is identical to the one your counterparts see in Sioux City, Iowa. The key to this universality is a procedure called replication, by which Notes copies information from computer to computer throughout the network. You might say Ozzie figured out how to make the machines telepathic—each knows what the others are thinking.

This article reported that around 4,000 major companies had purchased Notes, including Chase Manhattan, Compaq Computer, Delta Air Lines, Fluor, General Motors, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, J.P. Morgan, Nynex, Sybase, and 3M. While it wasn’t dominant in the way Windows was, its momentum was hard to ignore.

A 1996 commercial for Notes highlighted its use by FedEx. Other commercials would use the stand-up comedian Denis Leary or be highly conceptual. Rarely, if ever, would these television advertisements show the software.

In the mid-1990’s, it was common for magazines to publish stories about how Notes reshaped businesses large and small. A 1996 Inc. piece, for example, described how a natural-foods company successfully produced a new product in just eight months, a feat the company directly credited to Notes.

“It’s become our general manager,” Groveland Trading Co. president Steve McDonnell recalled.

Notes wasn’t cheap InfoWorld lists the price circa 1990 as US $62,000), and it was complicated to manage. But the positive results it enabled were immensely hard to ignore. IBM noticed and ended up buying Lotus in 1995, almost entirely to get ahold of Notes. Even earlier, Microsoft had realized that office collaboration was a big deal, and they wanted in.

Back to top

Microsoft jumps on the groupware bandwagon

Microsoft’s first foray into collaboration software was its 1992 release of Windows for Workgroups. Despite great efforts to promote the release, the software was not a commercial success. Daltrois/Flickr

Microsoft had high hopes for Windows for Workgroups, the networking-focused variant of its popular Windows 3.1 software suite. To create buzz for it, the company pulled out all the stops. Seriously.

In the fall of 1992, Microsoft paid something like $2 million to put on a Broadway production with Bill Gates literally center stage, at New York City’s Gershwin Theater, one of the largest on Broadway. It was a wild show, and yet, somehow, there is no video of this event currently posted online—until now. The only person I know of who has a video recording of this extravaganza is, fittingly enough, Ray Ozzie, the groupware guru and Notes inventor. Ozzie later served as a top executive at Microsoft, famously replacing Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect in the mid-2000s, and he has shared this video with us for this post:

Back to top

Back to top

A 1992 Washington Post article describes the performance, which involved dozens of actors, some of whom were dressed like the Blues Brothers. At one point, Gates did jumping jacks. Gates himself later said, “That was so bad, I thought [then Microsoft CEO] Ballmer was going to retch.” For those who don’t have an extra hour to spend, here is a summary:

To get a taste of the show, watch this news segment from channel 4. Courtesy of Microsoft Corporate Archives

Despite all the effort to generate fanfare, Windows for Workgroups was not a hit. While Windows 3.1 was dominant, Microsoft had built a program that didn’t seem to capture the burgeoning interest in collaborative work in a real way. Among other things, it didn’t initially support the TCP/IP networking protocol, despite the fact that it was the networking technology that was winning the market and enabled the rise of the Internet.

In its original version, Windows for Workgroups carried such a negative reputation in Microsoft’s own headquarters that the company nicknamed it Windows for Warehouses, referring to the company’s largely unsold inventory, according to Microsoft’s own expert on company lore, Raymond Chen.

Unsuccessful as it was, the fact that it existed in the first place hinted at Microsoft’s general acknowledgement that perhaps this networking thing was going to catch on with its users.

Launched in late 1992, a few months after Windows 3.1 itself, the product was Microsoft’s first attempt at integrated networking in a Windows package. The software enabled file-sharing across servers, printer sharing, and email—table stakes in the modern day but at the time a big deal.

This video presents a very accurate view of what it was like to use Windows in 1994.

Unfortunately, it was a big deal that came a few years late. Microsoft itself was so lukewarm on the product that the company had to update it to Windows for Workgroups 3.11 just a year later, whose marquee feature wasn’t improved network support but increased disk speed. Confusingly, the company had just released Windows NT by this point, a program that better matched the needs of enterprise customers.

The work group terminology Microsoft introduced with Windows for Workgroups stuck around, though, and it is actually used in Windows to this day.

In 2024, group-oriented software feels like the default paradigm, with single-user apps being the anomaly. Over time, groupware became so pervasive that people no longer think of it as groupware, though there are plenty of big, hefty, groupware-like tools out there, like Salesforce. Now, it’s just software. But no one should forget the long history of collaboration software or its ongoing value. It’s what got most of us through the pandemic, even if we never used the word “groupware” to describe it.