Ed Brill

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1. 1  Rob McDonagh http://www.CaptainOblivious.com | 5/20/2009 1:51:00 PM

   I know nothing about this specific situation, but I was amazed to learn recently of a major migration (no, not us, we're fine) forced by ONE USER's preference. Granted, he's an important user. But still. It's absurd. In this case, it wasn't even a matter of the person insisting that a different product is so much better - this was a case of the person relying on a specific product within their daily working tasks. Unreal. But absolutely true.

   In this case, it looks like the numbers may have been tweaked quite a bit. Business justifications? Invented after the fact. And I do mean invented. Sad and pathetic.

1. 2  Neil Wainwright http://www.nexonia.com | 5/20/2009 1:52:13 PM

   Keep making the UI better, keep making apps easier to build (and look better...see first point) and the rest will take care of itself. There is no doubt that IBM knows infrastructure and that this will never be an issue. UI and the app dev environment/capabilities are the things that I think will give Notes a boost. The applications are what saves Notes from replacement in most cases, so make the apps even better (and not just those that are built by a team of Java/Javascript/HTML/CSS gurus).

   ...Neil

   P.S. Yes, that means the "usability question" posed by Mary Beth on the usability blog about "should we allow database icons to be more modern than Windows 3.1?" should not have even been asked. I can bet Mary Beth was stirring the pot as I know she understands UI.

1. 3  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 5/20/2009 2:07:05 PM

   "Oh, and the Domino directory is *still* used as the master directory, somehow syncs up with Google"

   The issue is there is *no* directory with Gmail. I ran into that problem with school email (couldn't do lookups). In the case with Domino the best that can be done is to sync the Domino directory into the users type ahead contact list in Gmail - and it has to be updated daily

1. 4  Alan  | 5/20/2009 2:09:56 PM

   Anyone know anyone who worked at HB as a Domino Admin?

   If I did, I wouldn't admit to it either . . . . .

1. 5  John Rowland http://enterprisingnotes.blogspot.com | 5/20/2009 2:10:17 PM

   @2 Hearty agreement

   @3 How long till the pain starts to really cause their users heartburn?

1. 6  Christer Eklundh  | 5/20/2009 2:13:46 PM

   Another Notes to "samething else" migration. I feel like I read several Notes migrations per week now, and I feel sad every time, does it never end...?

1. 7  John  | 5/20/2009 2:27:59 PM

   HB was never cutting edge, aging environment, no desire to hire new talent had HB looking for change. Without investment in their current infrastructure this was the best choice. I guess the WebSphere path was not an option either. It's rough being on a dated version of Notes. The bigger question for IBM is will they stay on the AS/400?

1. 8  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 5/20/2009 2:28:39 PM

   Who installed this environment? Jez, are they running R3? If they have apps, how are they saving *any* money?

   As for the backup issue, that kind of "option" is actually kind of normal (shocking, but normal). They are just too cheap to buy TSM, BUE or BRMS. Domino (on Windows at least) locks the files so you can't copy them when Domino is running. So some *enterprising* network admin creates a script to shut it down in order to back it up. Typical of the super human admin types out there. Pure stupidity in reality. When asked why this is the case, it is usually that no one told them that Domino had a backup API and that the backup vendors implement against it (very much like VCB on VMware).

1. 9  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/20/2009 2:32:02 PM

   @8 at a minimum, use clustering and backup from the clustered server if you have to lock the file?

   @6 We had a win in the other direction just yesterday. 1500 users from Exchange. Have some press releases coming out.

1. 10  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 5/20/2009 2:52:03 PM

   @9, Ed, if you are too cheap (or stupid) to buy a backup solution, then I'm pretty sure your too cheap (or stupid) to install a cluster server ;)

   Now, Express customers cannot cluster, but they *can* replicate to another server and backup from there. So yes, you are completely correct. That doesn't mean it is not common to actually shut your production Domino environment to perform backups. It is common. It's just not a requirement (hence your point).

   I also meant to mention that if Domino has issues with Chinese char-sets, wouldn't you also expect that most Japanese companies (also needing DBCS char-sets) would have moved. Erm, right! Every Japanese company I have ever been in is running Domino without issues.

   Utter tosh on Google's part to publish such mis-representation. Very Microsoft of them. "Do no evil".....Far from it.

1. 11  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 3:01:53 PM

   "Could they have upgraded to Notes/Domino 8.x in that nine month period? Could they have implemented Domino clustering? Remote access? iNotes for browser usage? Notes 8 user experience? It seems like any one of those would have made an improvement to their Notes/Domino environment, at a fraction of the cost of migration."

   One wonders how HB was able to pull such a fast one on their users and shareholders. Surely these people all understood that Notes provides these benefits, right? I mean, EVERYBODY knows that! It's encoded into the human genome for cryin' out loud!

   Oh... wait...

1. 12  Palmi  | 5/20/2009 3:27:41 PM

   "Google allowed Hamilton Beach's employees in Mexico to work from home during the swine flu outbreak." Second word disdurbs me - "Allowed" - Why would´t they be able too ?- @11 Aggree How did this user pull this off - I wonder if he/she will be working for HB this time next year.

   Lack of Knowlegde is the reason for this -

1. 13  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 5/20/2009 3:27:44 PM

   "Google allowed Hamilton Beach's employees in Mexico to work from home during the swine flu outbreak" - imagine that, a solution that allows you to work from home. Hard not to be sarcastic really.

1. 14  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 5/20/2009 3:30:35 PM

   Oh my. The environment being down for backups once a month is somehow a Notes/Domino issue? Not to mention the absurdness of the remote access "issue."

   I just love how these migrations to a "better product" get justified with failings that have nothing to do with the product itself, but rather inept management of the environment.

1. 15  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 3:36:41 PM

   @12 - Of course lack of knowledge is the reason for this. Why would HB's users and shareholders lack knowledge about the products they already had?

   @14 - How does anyone know that their implementation is inept? How would you make that determination?

   Ed, but you're blaming the customer again. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but HB's user population probably had/has NO CLUE what a properly running environment should look like. Why should they? Under what context would they ever discover that their IT department didn't have the ultimate Notes deployment in the universe? As far as they know, they have the smartest, hardest working implementers in the business, and the product just sucks.

   Why would any user in any IBM customer know that there's something wrong with their implementation, rather than the product itself? Are they just born with that knowledge or something?

1. 16  Joni Snyder  | 5/20/2009 3:38:33 PM

   I think Hamilton Beach products suck and now their email sucks. It's a match made in heaven. They are a clueless lot.

   And 500 users!!! Any decent admin could have upgraded their servers and all the clients in a less than 2 weeks.

1. 17  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/20/2009 3:45:03 PM

   @15 as Heyward Drummond posted on the previous thread, IBM offered all sorts of ways to engage with both IT and line of business here. On the webcast, HB indicated that they had many meetings and surveys of their end-users and that it wasn't a dislike of (or an allegiance to) Notes. Surely with all the communication they did, we could have assisted with the end-user materials on sites like ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/notes, or the multimedia library, etc.

   From the webcast, Nate, this was all an IT (they call it IS there)-driven decision. I know everyone assumes that the end-users are driving this kind of stuff, but it was not represented that way today.

1. 18  Marie Scott http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/crashtestchix | 5/20/2009 3:51:40 PM

   @16 I agree with Joni - myself and one other admin in our shop created 32 Domino partitions (16 clusters) on 6 servers over a weekend and then the following weekend created 28,000 accounts without impacting the rest of the Domino domain. In a typical week we're upgrading 200 users to the Notes 8.5 client with SmartUpgrade with minimal help desk or support interaction, and MINIMAL retraining on the part of the end user. HB management apparently had made the decision to go with Google no matter what, so why not just say that?!

1. 19  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 3:52:58 PM

   @17 - On the contrary, I thought this was IT driven. IT had an incompetent deployment of Notes, and their users had no idea. So they basically proposed outsourcing themselves. And the users bought it, because how would they know any better? When would they ever have learned otherwise? How would an HB user even know that Notes might make working from home possible, or that they didn't need to take their servers down for monthly backups?

   Here's a hint: the answer would have NOTHING to do with IBM reps trying to schedule meetings.

1. 20  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 5/20/2009 4:04:52 PM

   @15 - Simple Nathan. Having an inadequate backup strategy that requires a production outage, and then blaming the product for said outage is inept IT management, plain & simple.

   That's my view at least.

   I am sure they thought they had a great system....which is why they then proposed to replace it. Hmm.

   @17 - So wait...now you're saying what I said in @14? : )

1. 21  Dwight Morse http://www.lotus.com/notesanddomino | 5/20/2009 4:09:05 PM

   One point that hasn't been brought up is the fact that Google, obviously, don't know how Notes and Domino works, either. I don't think that they're even at the point where they know what they don't know, yet.

1. 22  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 4:13:02 PM

   @20 - You didn't answer my question. I didn't ask whether it was competent IT management. I asked how the users were expected to get knowledge of whether their IT was managed competently or not.

   We can point fingers and say "what a bunch of maroons!" all day long, but if IT presented a plan to management that said "we need to migrate in order to be able to work remotely and not have all this downtime," why did management believe them? What's the explanation? Because they were ignorant of the capabilities of Notes? Why?

1. 23  Henning Heinz  | 5/20/2009 4:47:49 PM

   I still believe that blaming customers for doing stupid things is not a good strategy. Where is the IBM Apps 50$ (per user/year) offering for 500 seats? Not to mention that any upgrade to Notes 8 means: If you want to move your Domino web applications forward you have to redevelop everything in XPages. If you want better client applications invest in Composite Applications or wait for XPages in the client (but only the fat version, the classic client won't do that). That is a good thing if you are committed to IBM and not so good if you are a customer that has not been investing in their IBM Lotus portfolio for some time.

1. 24  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 5/20/2009 4:54:29 PM

   It's obviously a "political" press release and migration. If they are still using Domino for applications it's pretty hard to see how they are achieving 60% savings. Unless of course they are simply not paying maintenance altogether and will just let their current infrastructure "rot on the vine" until they can figure out how to migrate the applications to some other platform.

   It is also pretty hard to see in a post Domino R5 world how they were not able to "Work from Mexico." Domino has connected to that series of tubes known as The Internets for quite some time now.

   @18 - Good to see SmartUpgrade getting a public plug.

   I can also vouch for "Install Pump" by SoftQuest. It was a solid product back in late 2006, I can't imagine how much they've added to it by now. It's great at not only installing Notes itself but making changes to the client that are normally "post install" such putting icons on the workspace, creating replicas, configuring the preferences including personalizing the signature and much more. It literally saves hundreds of keystrokes and mouse clicks.

1. 25  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 5/20/2009 5:08:21 PM

   @22 - Fair point but I was never talking about the users. And being as I understand this as an IT decision it begins & ends there.

   I would rarely if ever expect the user base who don't have a technical IT background to understand what's best practice. To them a system down is a system down and they don't really care why.

   Company management believed IT because that's what they pay them for. They trust that IT will make the right call. Nevermind the "issues" they cite were all brought on by human decisions to act or not act.

1. 26  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 5/20/2009 5:16:00 PM

   @23 - I don't really think this is a matter of pointing blame.

   This was presented as a case study of why a company might move to Google and the issues behind the decision. When you put something like that out in the world, you open it for critique.

   As such, I think it's appropriate to point out that at least a few of the reasons they provide are flawed and point back to implementation issues rather than product issues, even though they're presented as a product issue.

1. 27  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 6:56:49 PM

   "Not to mention that any upgrade to Notes 8 means: If you want to move your Domino web applications forward you have to redevelop everything in XPages."

   False. And really a stupid thing to say. You know good and well that Domino is backwards compatible AGAIN.

   "If you want better client applications invest in Composite Applications or wait for XPages in the client (but only the fat version, the classic client won't do that)."

   Yes, if you want better client applications, use the new features. How else would you get BETTER applications? Using the old features? You could already do that? Why didn't you?

   What a ridiculous position. I'm embarrassed you agreed with me in the first sentence.

1. 28  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 7:01:47 PM

   @25 - If we take your point as true, then IBM has placed itself utterly at the mercy of IT, because no one would ever question their claims or decisions.

   I've worked with a lot of companies. I've seen very few in which a strategic communications medium can be migrating from one platform to another without approval of a CEO. That IT group must have a lot of trust.

   I wonder what IBM could possibly do to cause non-IT knowledge workers to have a better understanding of the Notes experience when it's not ineptly handled? After all, if the IT team only gives all their users 9600 baud access to gmail, it's going to suck pretty bad too. I wonder why they wouldn't get the impression that that's simply the way the web works?

1. 29  Henning Heinz  | 5/20/2009 7:02:45 PM

   Of course it is appropriate to point out false statements.

   I read a lot of comments about what is wrong with the current Notes setup and only little about why not move to Google Apps. No directory integration has been mentioned as one point although I recently read more about moving the Directory out of your Domino installation than about how the existing Directory can become better, more versatile and user-friendly. There is a statement that staying with Notes and moving to 8.5 would be much cheaper but there is no data to back this up. To sum it up. I would like to be more afraid about moving to Google Apps but I am not.

1. 30  Henning Heinz  | 5/20/2009 7:39:26 PM

   Backwards compatible means that your old apps work like they have always worked. That is a good thing but I was talking about moving forward. XPages as good as they are means that you can reuse your data but need to redevelop everything else. Companies like Hamilton do not seem to be willing to invest much. Of course you find this a ridiculous position. I did not expect otherwise but you forget that I am using 8.5, am quite used to XPages and many of my customers are on a current release. If I talk to those that don't want to that is what they tell me. For the client it is not that simple either. With Notes 8.5 if I want to use the new features you have to upgrade all clients to Standard. If I can't upgrade all machines I am pretty lost on the client side. No new features for me then. And my apps don't move forward. I again have to redevelop all of them. I haven't done this in R5, R6 and R7. In fact R8 is the first release and maybe this is related to that its roots are coming from another product line. And of course nobody wants to talk about the performance of the standard client. Again no big problem for me because I am using the Standard client and even the rough Designer 8.5 but not every customer is keen of renovating their house now.

1. 31  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/20/2009 7:51:59 PM

   @30 - "No new features for me unless I upgrade to the latest version"

   Well, duh.

   Plenty of people have talked about the performance of the client. Look around.

1. 32  John Turnbow http://www.recondite2.com | 5/20/2009 8:22:25 PM

   All that aside... I am waiting for some legal action against HB. What will Google do when asked by the court to deliver without HB's ineraction. I still don't know who owns the data. There is something bigger here that HB did not consider. I wonder who is doing their risk assessment... With all this outsourcing people are not realizing what they are losing. I'm just waiting for the first court battle. It will be fun to watch.

1. 33  Rick  | 5/20/2009 10:50:28 PM

   To be somewhat fair to the gMail folks in Mountain View and the old Hills Bros building, they are incredibly enthusiastic, and really are developing nifty tools for the beta consumer product that gmail is.

   What fascinates me, isn't that companies do these things when it's pretty obviously not based around any possible ROI that I can imagine, the holy war with Exchange has been going on for nearly a decade in earnest.

   It's that people that have complained about Notes poor user interface and sometimes (in the past at this point) kludgey calendar functions, choosing Gmail; with the worst UI in existence, terrible auditing tools, extremely marginal calendar and mobile support, lately with key UNSCHEDULED outages that the customer has zero notice or visibility into, no directory without building a new LPAP infrastructure (on you're site, not theirs) as their enterprise solution. Just because the CAL is cheap, there is cheap and there is value. They could have moved to Lotus Live Notes, gotten all the benefits of gmail for only marginally more money, and the migration wouldn't even have been a migration, Notes to Notes is easy, and you'd keep the ability to deliver disconnected user solutions (Well, the gmail offline sort of works, but to compare it to POP3 is a joke, IMAP and insult, and Domino replication a crime).

   So if the problem was "Our implementation skills in a small company aren't up to par, so we want to move to the cloud" Google really isn't the best solution for that...period. Zimbra, Lotus, MS even, has a strategy that at least seems to be addressing enterprise needs as opposed to giving a fairly undistinguished consumer product marketing clout because it says Google on it and saying its enterprise.

   I like the guys over at gmail, they're really smart, but they don't have the experience in the enterprise space and the product is still missing significant functionality for an enterprise device. The consumer version of Yahoo Mail and HotmaiLiveMSN are functionally superior, not to mention the high usability, functionality and flexibility, of a Notes 8, iNotes 8 solution. But, I think Google will build a product that is competitive over the next three or four years, but it's not there now.

   Silly customer, I know Domino BP's by the handful that could have fixed your Domino issues, for $200k or less in under 4 months, heck if you want mobile and browser support, it's 6 weeks and $75k. tsk tsk tsk.

1. 34  Peter Wilson  | 5/20/2009 11:21:20 PM

   Beyond the yellow bubble, upfortunately the Notes client is viewed as the ugly child and some of the recent migrations away Notes might not have occured if the UI changes in Notes 8 had occured in the R5 timeframe.

   To combat this, and to keep current market share, IBM needs some radical approaches such as:

   - Continue to focus focus on the Notes client

   - Spend some $$ and advertise Notes, Domino, Sametime products... many customer, end users think Notes disappeared with SmartSuite years ago

   - Consider some radical pricing strategies for existing clients. Sure it might cost you a lot of revenue, but you won't make any revenue of a client has moved to Exchange and OCS

   Just my 2 cents.

   Pete

1. 35  Venu Murthy  | 5/21/2009 1:29:50 AM

   We need to be mature enough to understand that its not possible to have the simplicity of a bicycle in an aircraft, ...ok even if they both are a mode of transportation!

   Well, i take it very personally when some one compares Lotus Notes/Domino to something as cheap as MS Exchange/Outlook, and now adding to the clowns--Gmail, what a shame. For a user to compose and send a mail Notes is also as simple as any of the other competing products. and for those who feel its not, go and get yourself trained or come to me i will do it.

   Ask anything from a Domino Admin and he can accomplish it through his server, there are no boundries in the Lotus Domino environment, anything can be done. We have a client who has the entire organization of thousands of employees working solely on Lotus Domino and some of the DBs have reached 50GB and they are doing well.

1. 36  Nick Halliwell http://www.comware.net | 5/21/2009 1:58:27 AM

   I am just amazed, all this talk and zero action. Why don't 1 of you write to the Chairman of the Board of Directors and point out what is being said here. If it is an IT decision then he has a right to know what a crap IT department he has.

   He might do nothing, but he is forewarned. He might just decide to do something.

   I would write to him, but I am sure that he would find it strange that a Notes company in Thailand is writing to him. Come on Chaps take some positive action. You have wasted loads of time already a couple more mins won't hurt and might just change something. Unless you try you never know.

   Nick

1. 37  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 5/21/2009 7:25:15 AM

   @32 makes some good points - data privacy/security is a big consideration when companies look to their email to the cloud.

   Other thought provoking ideas about this issue can be found here { Link }

1. 38  Erik Brooks  | 5/21/2009 7:29:24 AM

   For those not reading part of what Nathan's saying:

   They wouldn't meet with IBM reps?

   It can be hard to get troops on the ground without air cover.

   My grandfather-in-law just bought a Mac because "I've heard that they don't crash and don't get viruses."

   He's 83. He's been seeing those incredibly expensive-to-produce Mac-vs-PC commercials during American Idol.

   "But wait, he's retired, he wouldn't be targetted by IBM anyway." He used to be a divisional manager of a major retail chain. Feel free to connect the dots.

1. 39  Flemming Riis  | 5/21/2009 8:08:10 AM

   @it is usually that no one told them that Domino had a backup API and that the backup vendors implement against it (very much like VCB on VMware).

   IBM should provide a basic free backup app that would do a backup of domino running to user preferred schedule and location , it would remove 99% of the issues we see when users tried to restore a db that was in use from the os and is now a corrupt database.

   Not everyone have clusters or the budget for domino aware backup they should though but thats a different issues.

   Provide a backup program with domino that way you dont have to wait until the TSM team readies 8.0 for X64 as a older example.

1. 40  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/21/2009 9:08:35 AM

   @38 not to throw kerosene on this, but Apple's business model seems perfectly content to win customers over quantity 1 at a time. They have a retail presence and distribution system to do this. Grandpa-in-law can run to his nearest Apple store and buy a Mac and get genius support there. Were he still working, would he then have bought Macs for his entire division? My experience (typing away here as an executive for IBM on my Macbook) is that it doesn't necessarily--nor even often--carry through that way.

1. 41  Mike Miller http://www.gcsnotes.com | 5/21/2009 10:02:11 AM

   ala MasterCard...

   Getting to brag about migrating to Google on a webcast: Saved your company 60%.

   Getting canned because the CEO found out on Ed's blog what an incompetent IT manager you are: Priceless.

1. 42  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 5/21/2009 10:30:38 AM

   @39 - Schedule an agent that creates/updates replicas of databases in another folder or a UNC location. It achieves the same result. I know it's not "baked in", but it's relatively trivial.

1. 43  David Bell  | 5/21/2009 11:55:29 AM

   @34 - actually in the webcast the HB person said his users really didn't express any particular dislike of the Notes client or preference for another client. They were ambivolent provided they could still do their jobs when all was said and done.

   I have to agree with Nathan on his points. We have to solve the issue of why this customer "believed" they had to shut down for backup and maintenance, why language support was supposedly not available to them, and why remote access was an issue. It's not about a feature / function discussion, but about demonstrating what typical problems are avoided or what business needs are addressed in a good implementation.

1. 44  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 5/21/2009 12:26:30 PM

   @all, the customer (well actually IT) didn't "believe" all of this crap (maybe some items, but not all). They used it as an excuse to further IT's own agenda within the organization. And by IT I usually mean a single, powerful character in a power position in IT.

   I see this all the time. It is a personal crusade by some I(dio)T manager/director/etc who comes in and systematically humiliates and runs off anyone in their department that does not agree with their view point. Then, when it comes time to talk about "migrating" their argument for not sticking to the current solution is lack of skills, cost, consulting, etc.

   Sure, some enterprising end-user may bring up some valid points about staying with Notes, but IT and the CIO usually have budget over this type of project and hence final say-so. And because of budget they can make the finances look anyway they want at that point. The end-user is then sent packing, after all, "what do they know about corporate IT?". Who is the CEO going to believe about IT strategy? The CIO or an end-user? And you (as CEO) hired the CIO.

   The prevalence of social software seems to make more than a few in the yellow submarine think that a groundswell of end-user opinion, or dare I say activism, will change this outcome. Really? 40 (or 4000) users vs the CIO. The SME that you, as CEO hired, and the board approved, is not to be trusted on a strictly IT decision?

1. 45  Erik Brooks  | 5/21/2009 1:19:56 PM

   @40 - I understand what you're saying, but my point wasn't the immediate purchase decision.

   What's more important is the fact that he *knew of and considered* the Mac, which he never would have done had he not seen those commercials and had the ideas implanted in his head that "Macs don't crash, Macs don't get viruses, Macs are easy to use..."

   Air cover's obviously great for the troops, but it can also inspire and aid individual members of the underground resistance.

1. 46  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/21/2009 1:52:59 PM

   Marie Scott has some really good follow-up observations:

   "Haven't we all read about IT organizations that have implemented systems (any) only to turn around and literally rip them out a few years later because they were poorly implemented or poorly managed? Isn't it a management strategy to frequently blame it on the old system and prosthetize that the new system will most certainly be better?"

   { Link }

1. 47  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/21/2009 1:54:49 PM

   @44 - "Who is the CEO going to believe about IT strategy?"

   The judgment he's probably going to trust the most is his own. So how would judge whether the CIO is an I(dio)T?

   You want to call this CIO a fool who is undermining ROI, but you don't identify any means for someone to discover this. If the guy is such an idiot, why doesn't the CEO question his decision? In order to do so, he'd have to have some means of comparison.

   I'm always amused by the world of omniscient, omnipotent yet stupid managers that you describe. They're all arrogant and clueless, and yet have complete control and no capacity to learn. Truly you have interesting customers.

1. 48  Keith http://www.knproductions.com | 5/21/2009 2:34:06 PM

   Ed, now that the webcast is over, do you have any additional thoughts?

1. 49  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/21/2009 2:34:50 PM

   @48 this blog entry was posted after the webcast was over.

1. 50  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/21/2009 6:41:22 PM

   By the way, Hamilton Beach has left some comments on my prior blog posting on this topic:

   { Link }

1. 51  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/1/2009 11:43:07 AM

   There has been a follow-up story on this posted on the IT KnowledgeExchange site. The numbers **still** don't add up.

   { Link }