Groove: the downsides

Dave Winer points to Jeroen Bekker's weblog with two different views of Groove, one of them mine, which was deemed "positive" (and it was).   Jeroen references a negative review from vsabu.org that is a nice balance to my own breathlessness about Groove -- sometimes I get excited.  I read through V. Satheesh Babu's points and I have to say he's right on a number of them.  Some of them don't seem to matter as much in my particular environment, but then again, I've rolled it out to the IT group, which is used to rolling with the punches when it comes to trying new software.  We'll see how it works in broader circulation.  Anyway, back to Satheesh's points (and be sure to read at the bottom of the points on his page why he also likes Groove):

No printing.  I have run into this one as well.  I wanted to print something from the Sketchpad tool and was unable (or at least unable to figure out. . . and honestly, I haven't read the manual.  I've been able to print items in the Discussion Tool and other places, however.  There definitely should be some consistency here.

Huge download, every time.  Groove is somewhat of a download, but this hasn't been a problem.  We stick it on a server and let folks download it within the office LAN. 

Resource hungry.  No question about this one.  Groove is the most resource-hungry app on my laptop right now (1.1 ghz, 1GB RAM, WinXP), using about 26MB RAM by itself.  For comparison, Radio Userland is around 20MB and Mozilla is hovering around 15MB.  RAM is relatively affordable these days, but there's no denying that you need plenty.  (I haven't really analyzed CPU usage)

Platform for development.  I haven't even gotten into this one too deeply yet, but simple tools like the Tim Knip's Groove Interop Tool for Radio give me the impression that there's a lot to be leveraged underneath Groove's web services covers, and hooks are a Good Thing.

Intranet versions / security.  Like Satheesh, I haven't gotten too deeply into this either, but there is plenty of material available on the subject from Groove.  (Jon Udell gave Groove a 10 for security in his review.)  Groove also has intranet products (which mean more $$$ of course) to bring management completely in-house.

Saving spaces into corporate servers.  Haven't gotten into this yet and probably won't, so no comment yet.

Works only with Windows.  No doubt about that.  This is the most frustrating part for me, but again, I'm pleased to see that Ray Ozzie is listening on this point.  Using Virtual PC is the hack solution, but I can already see the help desk phone lighting up for Mac users who don't want to run a PC, much less one inside a virtual machine.

Stay tuned for how things with Groove continue to go here. . . should be interesting.