Although it hasn't publicised its strategy for tapping into the much-hyped trend, Microsoft is closely following the peer-to-peer space. And behind the scenes, the software company has been developing new P2P technologies in several different areas.
Heading up Microsoft's P2P activities is David Stutz, technical program manager in the company's technical strategy group, who said that Microsoft is a passionate advocate of the concept. "We believe in peer-to-peer," Stutz said. "It's inevitable for anything that needs to scale beyond the size of big Web farms."
Stutz has been acting as Microsoft's liaison to the nascent Internet P2P community, and has already met with several P2P companies. "We're now going to start talking to people who are developing peer-to-peer applications to find out what they need," he said. Stutz declined to name the P2P companies that Microsoft has been collaborating with, but a spokesman at Groove Networks - the P2P company founded by Ray Ozzie - confirmed that Groove's executives have had several technical meetings with Microsoft.
