-Now- we’re talking
March 7 2006
I'm sitting at the front of the auditorium
at the Copenhagen
edition of Lotusphere Comes to You.
The event itself was relatively quiet yesterday in Ârhus, but today,
the questions are coming. And many of them are on a common theme
-- the need for more Lotus marketing, fighting the "Notes is dead"
message.
The local team tell me that they've
run some Notes/Domino ads locally; they've done the press interviews; they've
got the customer case studies. We need to tell the story more. Like
the customer I met with yesterday who have 8000 Notes databases (in addition
to mail), including a Notes app they consider a competitive differentiator.
Like the partner who just told me he's already built two applications
which use Web Services in Domino 7. And lots more.
The interest level in "Hannover"
is quite high here. As I said on the Taking
Notes podcast last week, while
"Hannover"'s eye candy is clearly going to be a headline grabber,
it is the notion of composite
applications that is going to
expand the value of Notes for the next ten+ years. This is why I'm
encouraged by signs that the "Hannover" development team will
start taking their work more public, soon .... everybody wants to know
what's next for Notes.
Post a Comment
- 2
Frode | 3/7/2006 7:30:23 AM
Ok, so you got the Å in Århus wrong, but managed to get Ø in København right. Not bad.
- 3
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 3/7/2006 8:25:29 AM
I fixed the city on the previous entry, you're right, I had the wrong character.
As for your comment translating into big black blocks, it's a MIME conversion issue. Or maybe my blog has Lego on the brain. :)
- 4
Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 3/7/2006 8:55:37 AM
Ed - Say Hi! to Niels for me from the local posse.
(Ahh. Worked in CPH for a while near the little mermaid. Lovely place, would move there in a heartbeat.. Have one of the locals take you to Christiania..)
---* Bill
- 5
Thilo Hamberger | 3/7/2006 9:17:42 AM
"Hannover" is the new messiah and the expectations are extremely high. I just hope IBM can live up to them.
- 6
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 3/7/2006 11:38:59 AM
@4 I'm gone already! In Stockholm now. Next time...
- 7
Henrik Hansen http:://www.i-seven.com | 3/7/2006 12:02:38 PM
Hi Ed,
I attended the event at Copenhagen today og also suggested a few ways on how to fight back - i.e. be more agressive against MS FUD and tell the good stories - also outside of the Lotus/IBM Community.
Most of the time when we approach IBM with suggestions like this we are told that the strategy of IBM is not to be defensive. I agree, that it's not good to be defensive, but not doing anything is even worse and I think it's really essential that we all stand up to the pressure we're faced with from MS and others. We cannot sit back and listen to lies from MS like "Notes is dead", "No one is moving to Workplace" and so forth. We have to be more agressive and together with 2 of our competitors/partners, we (i-Seven) have therefore issued a press release where we announce joined forces against MS and also announce 3 seminars targeting CIOs, COOs, CTOs, CEOs and so forth. Check out our web site for more information on this initiative and good luck in Stockholm and where else your trip to Europe will take you.
I personally look forward to meeting you next year in Orlando. Hopefully, we (IBM and it's partners) will have managed to get the word around - also outside of the Lotus/IBM Community :-)
Cheers.
- 8
Bill Geimer | 3/7/2006 4:15:04 PM
@7 Your URL has an extra colon (::). Minor issue. I liked the web site once I got to it. Keep up the good work.
- 9
Giulio www.buzznotes.com.au | 3/7/2006 8:10:17 PM
Ed,
Just got back from the Sydney Event. It was packed. Ken was in good form with Jason Dumont and Johnathon Stern in support. All I can say is that the event has been under-estaimted. There is certainly alot of interest as most (90%) attendees remained for the duration of all presentations, (i dunno if the free lunch at the end of the presentations had anything to do with it).
Any notion of the "notes is dead" chatter is certainly "dead" around here, and has been for at least 12 months now. This event just hammered the point home.
- 10
Andrew | 3/7/2006 10:04:40 PM
OT: I attended the Lotusphere Comes to You session in Sydney today and while I was encouraged by the session and the number of attendees I was dissapointed on two fronts:
1. There was no time for questions from the packed auditorium and questions weren't encouraged. Ed - not sure if you can get the message out across IBM to encourage them to engage the audience rather than making these into push-only sessions
2. The 'How to Sell Microsoft in your Organization' (Ed's presentation from Lotusphere?) was presented by a technical guy who didnt seem very capable of clearly articulating the message, added a whole bunch of meaningless animated gifs to the presentation and was ostracizing people walking out of the session. I was dissapointed that this session wasn't done by a marketing person and handled a little more professionally.
- 11
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 3/7/2006 11:50:48 PM
@9 / @10 thanks to both of you for feedback. Funny how Ken Bisconti ended up in Oz and I ended up in -10 degree Stockholm....
Re Andrew's second comment, I'll pass that along. I think it was actually a combination of both my Lotusphere sessions, done in half the time. Perhaps not entirely practical...
- 12
Bjørn Bergqvist | 3/8/2006 1:09:45 AM
@11 Well, what is a trip to a sunny and warm country when you can visit the country of melancholy and self-assembly furnishing ;)
- 13
Tim Rynne http://www.timrynne.com | 3/8/2006 7:04:21 AM
@7 - Henrik - good luck with the seminars - great idea
We went to the sessions in Sydney today as well - overall it was a good way to spend the morning, there's a bit of excitement creeping back into the market here and hopefully we can all leverage it into a great little community.
(Would have loved a little bit of technical content though... sorry... I know we want it all sometimes! - still, I guess it's better to leave us wanting more...)
for anybody interested in a more detailed account of the sessions, both Laurette and I have written up our views of the morning on our respective blogs...
{ Link }
{ Link }
- 14
Lars Olufsen | 3/8/2006 9:24:27 AM
@Ed ... it's like Bill said - go to Christiania. You'll never care about Ken going to Oz and you going to scandinavia again ;-)
@Wild Bill ... How did the kilt fare in the Copenhagen nightlife?
Ok ... let's get back on topic.
I'm with Henrik on this (@7). Open up the dailies in Denmark, and quite often you'll see ads for Microsoft product groups (mainly the annoying dinosaur stuff). Open up IT or business magazines, and you can bet your life that MS is actively pushing its products. Open the doors of the danish CIOs, and you'll find MS people lapdancing, wearing only unsigned license agreements.
Big Blue? If at all, you're more likely to see them push a hardware platform.
Finally find that Domino 'boxing gloves' ad in some magazine, and you'll see a link to "www.ibm.com/middleware/collaborate". What happened to { Link } ??
You can hardly find the Lotus logo in the picture ??
IBM isn't branding the platform at all, and in a world where BRANDS are almost more important than the product, that's nothing short of a disaster.
125 millions seats, without really pushing effectively since what, 1999? Double digit growth in 2005, based on this ad alone? ->{ Link }
Imagine what COULD have been, if the Lotus brand had been championed in an agressive, creative and persistent manner!
Microsoft can get world-wide media attention focused on the 'origami', which frankly seems to be ... nothing new at all, yet IBM can't get a buzz going about the best collaboration/productivity platform out there.
MS can get organizations to make continuous upgrades to Office without actually getting ANY enhanced functionality.
IBM can't explain the revolutionary impact of activity centric collaboration (or aren't trying).
So, Ed's fighting his usual battle here and on the road. Great. We all love you, Ed. IBM is blog-fighting FUD, which is good ... if you know where to find that blog, but ... frankly ... NOBODY outside the community does.
It is all reactive actions. No proactivity. No 'attack' - all 'defend'.
How often have anybody working with Notes/Domino heard their boss tell them that "I saw this cool feature in the next domino release that I want"? It hasn't happened in my organisation since before R5 was released.
The Lotus brand and the "IBM Workplace family" are some of the most radical business-software in the world. It is being marketed like it was an extinct product.
Somebody at Lotusphere proclaimed that 'the gloves are off'. Great - then let's rumble instead of sitting around talking about it.
Yellow IS the new black. WE already know this - now tell the world.
- 15
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 3/8/2006 11:06:19 AM
Like in the thread started out of Sweden today, these are great comments and many are reading. Keep them coming.
- 16
Darryl Miles | 3/10/2006 5:36:16 AM
Hi Ed,
I attended the Melbourne (Australia) event and it was well received. I was impressed by the Workplace Forms (really nice), Sametime 7.5 and of course Hannover.
I felt the Hannover demo could actually go a bit further in terms of a 'slick interface'. It didn't seem to be as stylish as the screen shots provided late last year. But I guess by having an Eclipse component client, the whole interface can be tuned far more easily.
Darryl
How about this - I know of at least 10 firms that use Exchange in my industry (professional services) that needed to find better archiving solutions (basically they needed to move from local user archives to an archive server). They have purchased expensive add-in solutions like Zantaz or Enterprise Vault to accomplish this.
The 4 Notes shops -- setup another Notes server, replicate archives from local computers to server using a script. Done. No new expensive software needed, no new technology to integrate and learn and support, and completed in a week.
$100,000+ saved. Think Yellow!