What did I miss?
February 26 2011
When you travel to four cities in four days, with the requisite packing and repacking, meals on the go, dead cell phone batteries, and the like, you miss a lot.
On an individual level, I missed remembering to take my reading eyeglasses with me as I left my inbound flight to Munich. It's OK, it's time for a new prescription anyway, and in a sure sign that I'm getting older, I think the word "bifocals" might be part of it. But I also missed remembering to take my wool hat along when I left my inbound flight to Hamburg. It is time to figure out a better way to schlep.
On a personal level, I missed my family and they missed me. A lot of Skype-ing going on this week. I don't think my 8-year-old understands that as recently as just before she was born, I had to worry about ensuring that I could call landline to landline while travelling. Now we can call mobile phones anytime, chat with each other in Words with Friends games, send emails and pictures, and have a world clock handy to know what timezone daddy is in at all times. Unfortunately, it seems that all of this technology isn't enough. Some work ahead.
On a professional level, I missed sharing some news. What an interesting week when Cisco announces that after purchasing Postpath for $215 million, then spending another several million converting it into a SaaS product, they're walking away. Which, when you walk away from software, it means nobody bought it. I am not at all surprised. My colleagues and I were pretty surprised that Cisco spent that much money for an email server in the first place, and they learned as we had that claiming to be a drop-in replacement for Exchange is harder than it looks.
Speaking of harder than it looks, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 earned another notch in the belt for Microsoft's vaunted mobile device strategy. Though they've rushed to obfuscate it quickly, but apparently a scheduled OS update on Samsung phones turned some into bricks. Great feature! And I should rush for us to support this operating system exactly why? I understand there is some market for Windows Phone 7 in the enterprise, but it seems at the moment to be a #4 player, whereas for the top 3, we can support much more than just push email/calendar/contacts through having built or partnered for native clients and interfaces. Support for ActiveSync alone isn't able to provide the transport for other collaborative or social requirements, and rightly we'd prefer to build out a complete set of capabilities on every mobile OS we support than stay boxed into the email domain. We're going to continue to watch this space, but even Nokia's work with Microsoft doesn't matter until 2012, so for now, the team is rightly focused on mobile capabilities that will matter this year.
On the flip side, here are some things I didn't miss this week --
- One of the best ever Q&A sessions at an LCTY, in the closing session of edcom nachlese in Munich. I am not sure how we would ever recreate such a session - even the Germans were surprised at how interactive the discussion became.
- I met some really great partners doing tons of good stuff in XPages, mobile, Connections, and Notes client management. More about these in the coming days.
- Some equally great interactions with my colleagues along the way. I met Maria Gomez, the new Director for IBM Collaboration Solutions in Germany, who is quickly finding opportunity in her new role. Stefan Wissel finally explained the uniquely German garden plotz to me. I had a wonderful dinner with my colleagues Kevin Cavanaugh, also criss-crossing Germany this week, and Christian Holsing.
- Some gracious and passionate hosts for the week -- Otto Förg and the edcom team, Felix Binsack and the TIMETOACT staff, Andreas Hiller and GIS, and Henning Kunz/Jens Polster and a successful SP Integration LCTY. In all, about 400 people across the four events -- and there were at least two other LCTYs in Germany this week that I was aware of. Thank you to all for the opportunity to come speak to our mutual customers and partners.
The next few weeks I'm staying home to focus on the business plan for IBM messaging and collaboration solutions. Through road trips like these, surveys, support data, Lotusphere, ideajam, forums, usability design, and many many other places, we have lots of opportunities to open up in the year or two ahead. It's time to convert those ideas to actions. I might be a little more quiet than normal, but it's only a little over two weeks until I leave for Istanbul and Vienna events in mid-March. This kind of balanced office/customer-facing work is something I would definitely miss -- the time on the road grants the energy to do the hard work at home.
Post a Comment
- 3
Bill Geimer | 2/27/2011 12:29:03 AM
An organization that I will not mention but work for supports Blackberries, iPhones, iPads and to a slightly lesser extent, Droids. Windows 7 is not anywhere in the game. In truth, only the iPhone 4 really supports encryption, and only just.
And while Apple's iPhone is just one system, Droids are many hardware types, but at least by 2.2 and 3.0, the differences are smoothing out, The NKOTB (probably just violated a registered trademark) is barely there, really only on one network, but running on several platforms with integration by the each platform vendor,
If an iPhone dies, at least on GSM, move the sim card. If a Droid dies, move the SD card. If a Windows 7 phone dies, sorry, the card will be formatted if you move it to another phone. That feature is going to keep it out of a lot of shops,
It is not just vendor who have to make this kind of decision, although it is a lot less expensive on the company side as its just a matter of what you buy to support a tool. Its not developing and testing expenses,
- 4
Volker Weber http://vowe.net/about | 2/27/2011 4:27:13 AM
Ed, I am not talking about "supported" yet. It would be great, if it just worked. It does not.
Bill, the SD card is disabled where security matters.
- 5
Erik Brooks | 2/27/2011 7:18:16 AM
@3 - "If a Windows 7 phone dies, sorry, the card will be formatted if you move it to another phone."
Wow, really? It blows my mind MS is still doing treading down this path.
- 6
Palmi | 2/27/2011 9:24:30 AM
I can´t see Windows mobile going places in next 2 years, with Apple coming out with 3 types of Iphones and Android just kicking butt in function and usability then only die hard MS fans are going to pick those phones with windows on it. I bet six pack that in before year 2015 MS will drop MS MobileOS all together.
- 7
Jens Polster http://www.domblog.de/domblog.nsf/d6plinks/lcty2011 | 2/27/2011 10:05:59 AM
Ed, hope you had a good trip home. Thanks for coming to Frankfurt and being part of our Lotusphere Comes to You event.
- 8
Volker Weber http://vowe.net/about | 2/27/2011 11:08:57 AM
Erik, hard to imagine that there are smart people at Microsoft, isn't it. You cannot move a memory expansion from one WP7 to another, and that works exactly as designed. Can you come up with a reason, why you would not want removable storage in a smartphone? And do you know that a memory expansion is not easily accessible by the user?
- 9
Erik Brooks | 2/27/2011 8:04:00 PM
@Vowe - "And do you know that a memory expansion is not easily accessible by the user?"
Hmm... it's definitely user-accessible on the Samsung Focus last I checked. What I *didn't* know until @3 is that WP7 doesn't treat microSD as hot-swappable storage -- it mixes it in with all of the other memory on the phone. Since removing the microSD after use will definitely cause all sorts of drama, why did MS allow the first WP7 phone to be released with the slot user-accessible? Or is Samsung 100% at fault here? And does the user care whose fault it is when they're told not to use their slot?
"Can you come up with a reason, why you would not want removable storage in a smartphone?"
Sure - to anger my users and leash them to a proprietary app store. Though that seems to really only work if you're Steve Jobs and you're first-to-market and can implement incredible attention to detail due to complete vertical control of the hardware and software.
Yes, I know the real answer is "security." But that makes me raise my eyebrow again. Last I checked you can't even drag files off WP7 to USB. Since MS obviously is late-to-market, choosing a "secure" route implies that MS is more concerned with the corporate market than the consumer one.
Apple obviously hit the consumer market first and is driving corporate penetration through that route. Android started with consumers also though is starting to straddle the line into the business side more, especially with RIM coming on board. MS's strategy sounds wrong to me, especially for a company that has penetrated the consumer market so heavily in the past.
"...hard to imagine that there are smart people at Microsoft, isn't it."
I know you were being sarcastic, but yes, it has been pretty hard to imagine MS doing many smart things lately. As you've pointed out their stock price is pretty much flat since 5 years ago, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that their latest efforts aren't much better than their others in the past several years.
But who knows, maybe part of why the Kim was cancelled was because it had a portable memory card.
I'm with @6, I don't see WP going places in the next couple of years. And with Ed basically saying that only Nokia's eventual usage even puts it on his radar, I can't help but keep laughing at MS's mobile strategy.
- 10
Craig Wiseman http://www.wiseman.la/cpw | 2/27/2011 8:04:15 PM
Activesync support is a standard feature across all smartphones. To me it makes complete sense to provide *unsupported* but working activesync support to cover as many devices as possible, and then hand build whatever client software you want for the major/primary OSes.
That's how Google, Microsoft, and others are playing this.
I don't see how IBM's approach helps customers by limiting the devices they can use with Domino.
- 11
Erik Brooks | 2/27/2011 8:08:57 PM
Oh, I almost forgot one more reason to hamstring removable storage: DRM.
Bad for the customer, and therefore bad for business, right Volker? ;-)
- 12
Albert Buendia http://www.slug.es | 2/28/2011 10:17:15 AM
I would like to see Apple iMail working also with Lotus Traveler. This is a real problem for my remote customers who want an offline email application and want to sync his Notes account but don't need a Notes ID on its Macs. It's all about MS Activesync... and Apple agreement...
I don't want to open such insecure protocols like POP3 or IMAP for security reasons onto the Domino server.
Kind Regards.
- 13
Craig Wiseman http:/www.wiseman.la/cpw | 2/28/2011 12:05:46 PM
@12 - Apple iMail doesn't use Activesync, it uses the OWA 2007+ (outlook web access) calls to sync.
No, I don't understandy why they'd do that. I only explain, not defend.
- 14
Bob Congdon http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog | 3/3/2011 1:24:33 AM
@13 Actually, the Mail, iCal and Address Book apps in Mac OS X use EWS (Exchange Web Services) to talk to Exchange, not OWA.
- 15
Craig Wiseman http://www.wiseman.La/cpw | 3/17/2011 5:17:29 PM
@14 Thanks for clarity! Still, the core point remains... no activesync involved.
Was good seeing you in München.
What I don't understand is this: you have implemented Exchange ActiveSync to support the iPhone and iPad. How hard would it be to make sure it works with more than those two? It's not rocket science: { Link }