A Tale of Two Grooves

A Tale of Two Grooves
The happiest guys in the world, having just sold Groove to Microsoft.

When Microsoft revealed that it was using renaming its Xbox Music service to Groove, there was a bit of confusion. After all, there was another music app out there with the same name as well.

As it turns out, Microsoft Groove and that separate Groove app were two different things. And the Groove Smart Music Player, as the other app was called, was made by a Montreal-based startup called Zikera.

How could this be? Wouldn’t Zikera sue Microsoft if it had the name first? And wouldn’t Microsoft’s eager lawyers have discovered that the name Groove wasn’t just being used elsewhere, but was in fact being used for a music app?

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Now, we may never know for sure. Because Microsoft just bought Zikera.

UPDATE: Microsoft actually bought Groove from Zikera, sorry. The company will continue on. –Paul

We are thrilled to announce that Groove has been acquired by Microsoft!

We envisioned a music player so intelligent that learns our tastes and habits in order to play the right music at the right time. Then Groove was born, and you made it a success. We are incredibly proud to have delighted you with a rich mobile experience and countless hours of music bliss through the tens of millions of personalized playlists we generated.

In light of this acquisition, Groove is no longer available for download, but current users may continue to use the app.

Not a word in there about Groove technologies or features making their way into (Microsoft) Groove. So I can only conclude that this acquisition was all about the name, and about clearing up that little legal nicety.

And irony alert: This is the second time Microsoft has purchased something named Groove. The software giant bought Ray Ozzie’s Groove back in 2005.

 

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation

There are no conversations

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC