With the exception of the developer platform and tooling products, I've been thoroughly confused with Microsoft's product strategy for a couple of years now. They've been acquiring companies at a fair steady rate, but the acquisitions have seemed fairly random.
In March of 2005 Microsoft acquired Groove Networks. This is where Microsoft picked up Ray Ozzie - the braintrust of Groove. Ray is now Microsoft's CTO
Microsoft launched its Windows Live in November of 2005. It was prettier than MSN and very startup-y in it's branding, but I believe it quickly just got thought of as a re-skinning of MSN.
At roughly the same time Microsoft acquired FolderShare and appeared to slowly rebrand it as another Windows Live* service, but it remained more or less the exact same technology the acquired.
In Office 2007 Microsoft rolls up Office Groove. I've never taken the time to really look at this product, but my assumption has always been that's its basically the old Groove product but rebranded as Office and Sharepoint-enabled.
There's was a lot of buzz yesterday and continuing into today... and now it's all starting to make a lot more sense. This looks extremely interesting. Watch this video on Channel 10. This appears to be FolderShare + Groove + Remote Desktop + ActiveSync. I'm sure there will be hooks in here for Windows Home Server as well.
This looks very exciting...