A call for passive activism

IBM is celebrating their 100th anniversary by highlighting their top 100 contributions. One they selected is World Community Grid. From the World Community Grid website:

World Community Grid brings people together from across the globe to create the largest non-profit computing grid benefiting humanity. It does this by pooling surplus computer processing power. We believe that innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can help make the planet smarter. Our success depends on like-minded individuals - like you.

Here's how it works: IBM donates the hardware and coordinates the projects that get submitted to WCG. People like you and me install an application on our computers that downloads work for these projects -- such as curing cancer, AIDS, and polio, or finding more nutritious strains of rice -- and then churns through it (or as I like to say "and a miracle occurs"). Once it's all analyzed the data is sent back to WCG where the IBM servers aggregate it for the researchers.

You don't have to leave your computer on all the time, or have it running constantly so it slows down your computer. The hour your screensaver is running while you're at lunch or in a meeting is an hour you could be contributing to solving the world's problems.

Incidentally, there is a WCG team for Lotus Domino Bloggers. There are 26 members but only three of us have been active in the last couple of months. If you're reading this through PlanetLotus please consider joining your peers.

it's a vicious cycle

I was doing some research about the history of IBM and came across a blurb that struck me. Which of these do you think is the correct quote?

Between 1971 and 1975, IBM investigated the feasibility of a new revolutionary line of products designed to make obsolete all existing products in order to re-establish its technical supremacy. This effort, known as the Future Systems project, was terminated by IBM's top management in 1975, but had consumed most of the high-level technical planning and design resources during five years, thus jeopardizing progress of the existing product lines (although some elements of FS were later incorporated into actual products).

Or...

Between 2002 and 2006, IBM investigated the feasibility of a new revolutionary line of products designed to make obsolete all existing products in order to re-establish its technical supremacy. This effort, known as the Workplace project, was terminated by IBM's top management in 2007, but had consumed most of the high-level technical planning and design resources during five years, thus jeopardizing progress of the existing product lines (although some elements of Workplace were later incorporated into actual products).

Believe it or not, the first one is straight out of Wikipedia. All I did was change the dates and the name of the project to come up with the second.

The scope of the Future Systems project was very different than Workplace (FS sought to make all existing computers obsolete; Workplace just wanted to do the same to Notes and Domino [yes, that is an editorial comment]) but both left IBM scrambling to salvage something from their efforts. Future Systems eventually led to the System/38, which evolved into the AS/400. Workplace yielded Expeditor, which is the framework underpinning the current Notes 8 release. Time will tell where that ends up.

Even though both efforts had some positive benefit I'm still left wondering why such vast amounts of time and resources are being spent on distractions that sometimes take decades to recover from. Innovation is one thing, bending your existing customers over a barrel just because you want to maintain or achieve market dominance has proven to be an unwise move. Hopefully IBM will eventually learn from that.

IBM and Apple ... does it blend?

As you may have noticed by now, I subscribe to several Computerworld newsletters. I find they cover a variety of subjects, have a lot of good content, and they even sometimes surprise me with the off-the-wall things they come up with.

A recent article by Don Tennant really got me thinking. Don puts forth the idea that Microsoft's worst nightmare is an IBM/Apple merger.

I asked Gates what trend or development had occurred in the technology sector in the past 20 years that really caught him by surprise. His deadpan response: "Kaleida and Taligent had less impact than we expected."

Gates was referring to two software joint ventures formed in the early '90s by Apple and IBM that were already fading into oblivion. There was something different in his tone -- a biting sarcasm -- that reflected a degree of scorn that he seemed to reserve for the Apple/IBM combo. And it was telling.

Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows.

Rumors of an IBM and Apple merger have come and gone for years. There's something different in the air now. Just as Apple is starting to gain greater popularity, they have started dropping their enterprise-oriented products. At the same time, IBM's heritage has become a bit of an albatross around its neck so it has to do something soon or risk losing the recent momentum that it is building.

IBM has obviously drunk the Kool-Aid that says sexy sells. Just look around. They finally updated their website to a new look, they actually made Notes not look like a 1980's throwback, and they're trying to engage a younger crowd. IBM needs to take it the next level, though. They have excellent products for business, but with the spinning off of its consumer printers as Lexmark and the sale of its PC division to Lenovo a few years ago, IBM has no entree into consumer technology. If you ask the average person under 30 why IBM is a household name it's because "they used to be relevant". No consumer will ever purchase an IBM product today. That's a bad thing for IBM.

As we are clearly experiencing, the next big things in business IT are coming from the consumer side. They're often not new, corporate IT has been doing things like mashups, composite apps, and social networking for years, but they are being torn apart and reinvented for consumer use, who then bring the simplified and exploded versions back into the corporate world. That's the power and the promise of the Internet Age, and IBM is going to have to get into the consumer market to be a player in future corporate IT. It was moderately important in the 80's and 90's, but today if you make business software without a consumer presence of some type you're dead.

So I think IBM needs to buy Apple. It would give Apple the credibility it needs in corporate IT, and give IBM the street cred it needs. If such a thing happens hopefully IBM has learned from its mishandling of Lotus and will be extremely laissez-faire. It took about a decade for IBM to finally grasp that the community is what made Notes successful and that backing off was the best thing. I'm not sure Apple's faithful could survive IBM's Nurse Ratched-like tenderness for that long. :-)

probably old news for most of you

Here is my Netvibes page with the IBM/Lotus blogs I subscribe to. What do you notice about it?










See the second one from the top on the right? That's right... Damien Katz is back at IBM! I don't know what, if anything, that will mean to Notes developers, but it's definitely not a bad thing.

Ed Brill: Perception is reality

(the post title is a trackback link)

Karen Demerly (comment #16) makes an extremely compelling argument:

So what is IBM/Lotus doing to change the perception of IBM/Lotus? I think that's been asked here before. It's obviously not always about price points, or ship dates, or whether the refresh button is F5 or F9.

I think IBM ought to be throwing Lotus products off the parade float - giving it away, putting it in the hands of every youngster in the world. Our kids should grow up on IBM software. Then their perception will be changed, won't it?

This is exactly where IBM has always failed: IBM has never really marketed to consumers. Lotus never targeted Notes at consumers, either, but the world was different then. Most homes didn't have a computer, they were strictly the purview of business. IBM bought Lotus just as the consumer appeal of the Internet was building, but Notes and Domino continued as business-focused products while the widespread consumer adoption of the Internet passed it by. IBM/Lotus added Internet-oriented features to Notes and Domino and supported a wide array of protocols, but it was always in the context of business use. They never made any attempt to make Notes or Domino sexy or have mass appeal.

While they were ignoring the consumer side altogether IBM didn't count on a company like Microsoft entering the picture. Microsoft wanted a piece of the business pie but couldn't compete solely on technical merit, and had no chance of getting a foothold in large enterprise IT shops. So they started mudslinging and spreading FUD while they flailed about trying to create (or buy) products to compete with IBM's Lotus offerings. They used smaller companies who were less risk averse as their starting point, eventually ending up with some products that are mostly good enough for fairly sizable companies.

The number of these smaller companies that were started in the 80's and 90's and grew to be megacorps dwarfs the number from the previous 40 years. And virtually all of them grew up with Microsoft products. New companies in the new economy were looking for small and agile solutions that were easily integrated and extremely flexible. They didn't care if they had to rip it all out and start over every year, they only had 40 employees. By the time they grew to 400 employees Microsoft was so firmly entrenched that they couldn't back out.

IBM was still lumbering along in the old mindset while the world was changing around it. They had Domino, which with some TLC and attention could meet the growing SMB needs. Instead of responding to this by focusing on Domino they went the Workplace route because it was big, monolithic, and fit traditional business models IBM was comfortable with.

I agree completely that IBM needs to get Lotus products into consumer hands, because those are the products most relevant to consumers. They don't care about autonomic computing but they do care about having a one stop shop for all their needs. I don't think I've ever heard any end user type say "damn I wish I had more applications to open!" No, they want to open one application and have it do everything they need. Notes can do that. Domino could be scaled down and reworked so it could be used as a personal web server and file server.

Until IBM groks in fullness that consumers ultimately drive business IT they're going to be losing market share -- or at least the perception of market share.

Crazy cool technology - IBM Live Partition Mobility (updated 8/22/2007)

From the IBM Press room:

In June, IBM shipped its first System p 570 servers with the POWER6 processor -- the world's fastest chip -- containing a unique design that creates dozens to hundreds of "virtual" servers on a single box. Live Partition Mobility, currently in beta testing with general availability planned later this year, is a continuous availability feature that will enable POWER6-based servers, such as the System p 570, to move live logical partitions -- including the entire operating system and all its running applications -- from one server to another while the systems are running.

Update 8/22/2007: How's that for disruptive innovation? I was reminded that VMWare has offered VMotion for a long time. Live Partition Mobility is cool, but not quite as bleeding edge as I first thought.

Crazy cool technology: IBM pokes holes in chips...

The CPU advancements from IBM keep on coming. Now they've come up with self-assembling nanotech plastics to provide better insulators inside CPU's. Read all about it.

Fresh perspectives: Craig Wiseman

Back last Fall there was a discussion brewing about the perception that Notes was dead. At that time I questioned Domino's place at the table and proposed that it was perhaps Domino that was actually headed for extinction. Since then we've had a Lotusphere and I'm even more convinced that Domino is being shunned in favor of Websphere.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this trend. Craig Wiseman also picked up on it, and wrote a very good and slightly tongue-in-cheek analysis of why we should call the post-8 version of Domino, Websphere Lite.

... We have problems. Seems like IBM would like to have a single message for developers, sales folks, and customers. Domino is an excellent product that has a history of evolving, and there are lots of open source/easily available tools. IBM's long term app server seems way too big and complicated to fit small customers.

So how do we solve it? We get two versions of Websphere, Websphere Lite and Websphere Gargantua.

It gets better from there. Unlike me Craig doesn't see doom and gloom in Domino's future. It'll be interesting to see which vision, if either, is closest to reality. I'll go pop some popcorn and watch the spectacle, you go read Craig's blog. :-)

is dogfooding always a good thing?

1.	dogfooding (to dogfood)
	In a nutshell, dogfooding means "using your own product". A product which is being dogfooded tends to be a lot more polished. When a normal user is annoyed by the product, they can't do anything about it. But when a developer is annoyed by the product, they can stop what they are doing and make the product less annoying.

The above is from Urban Dictionary, and I think it's safe to say we're all familiar with this concept. Dogfooding is generally regarded as a good thing since it allows developers to experience customer pains first hand. But dogfooding has another side beyond just development. What happens when when through the process of dogfooding you become one of your own largest customers? How do you balance your own needs against those of the rest of your customers? And how do you get your developers in a mindset where they are focused externally and not just internally?

According to Lotus sources about half of Domino's customer base is SMB. I have seen different people from Lotus define that as 1000 user and 5000 users. There is a tremendous problem with this definition. I've discussed it before, but it's relevant to this conversation. According to the US Small Business Administration SMB's may vary from 100 to 1500 employees depending on the industry. The average works out to 500. The European Union defines a SMB as under 400 employees. More importantly, SMB's employ over 97% of the people in the US and account for over 99% of the businesses. IBM's definition is so far out of line with the rest of the world it's absurd, and this disconnect is the source of a lot of their perception problems.

When adding functionality to the Lotus product line IBM's focus is on big companies and large environments because they are one. First and foremost they have to make sure their tools work for themselves. I get that and it's certainly understandable, it's just being done in a way that has alienated a large portion of their customers: the SMB's.

Since IBM took over Lotus the evolution of the product set has been schizophrenic. From a "two lane highway" message to spinning off a competing product line (Workplace), to mostly dismantling that effort and assigning that product's name as the overarching "strategy" moniker for all messaging and collaboration products -- it's been a real rollercoaster. It's been almost as difficult to keep up with as the renaming of the server lines that happens every few years. (It'll always be an AS/400 dammit!)

After Workplace was largely disbanded as a product line portions of it started appearing under the guise of Domino functionality. All of a sudden we started hearing about integrating Activity Explorer with Notes. Workplace Designer was rebranded as Lotus Component Designer and would allow consumption of Domino data with either a Notes client or web interface. In separate news the Sametime Realtime Community Gateway was going to allow federation to several popular public IM networks. The Domino community rejoiced. We were finally first-class citizens alongside the Websphere crowd! Then the other shoe dropped.

None of the new functionality uses Domino. Activity Explorer is deployed on Websphere and DB2. The Sametime RTC Gateway is as well. Lotus Component Designer can't deploy to Domino, you have to deploy to Websphere Portal. The only real interface is web-based, but you can wire it into a composite application in Notes 8 -- provided you use the Standard (Eclipse-derived) client, which comes with its own huge list of caveats. The early buzz changed to cries of outrage.

IBM kept trying to spin all this positively. The justification given for Activity Explorer and the Sametime RTC Gateway using a non-Domino underpinning is scalability. Allowing two different backends was considered, but written off as too expensive. During the discussion about the Sametime RTC Gateway we were told it had to scale to "carrier grade deployments" of the VoIP integration. Okay, I'll bite. How many SMB's out there (by a standard definition and not IBM's) are telecommunications carriers? If there are any, how many are deploying Sametime for VoIP?

Someone at IBM finally realized that SMB's couldn't afford Websphere Portal so IBM released Websphere Portal Express. It promises under 60 minutes installation time and a more attractive price point. I've not installed it so I can't comment on that, but the price I saw was $40,000. If that's more affordable I'm glad I don't know what the non-Express version costs. It shows yet another disconnect between IBM and their customers.

Just when I thought the news for SMB's couldn't get any more depressing, at Lotusphere 2007 Mike Rhodin announced Connections. There is a lot of compelling functionality and I was really excited about it, so I went on a fact finding mission. I wanted to know how it is licensed and how is it deployed. It's been three months since Lotusphere and there is no information on the Connections site so I started contacting people inside Lotus. So far I've been through four contacts and as soon as I say "about 200 users" my phone calls and e-mails aren't returned. I don't take the dismissal personally, but it does tell me that Connections isn't intended for SMB's.

Coming full circle, I think in this case dogfooding has hurt IBM. They are releasing exciting products with amazing features and functionality. They're just doing so on an infrastructure that's too heavy for the average SMB to justify, and at a price point that's unreachable for them as well. I encourage IBM to continue the practice of dogfooding, but I also encourage them to use the experience wisely. Let the developers fix the things they find wrong. Listen to all your customers and do the things they ask you to. Don't be afraid to try another flavor, possibly something in the "lean" or "light" area, or different packaging. Hint: licensing (i.e. "Express") doesn't go far enough.

N.B. I intentionally left out links to references to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

IBM developerWorks inducted into Jolt Hall of Fame

I was looking through developerWorks and noticed a little sidebar saying "Congratulations developerWorks". Clicking through I was pleasantly surprised to learn that developerWorks has been inducted into the Jolt Hall of Fame. I haven't seen this picked up in the blogosphere yet so I thought I'd share the news and see if it trickles out.

Domino's place at the table

The discussion over on Ed's blog is about why people believe rumors that Notes is dead. I posted a lengthy comment there, but I had some more thoughts on the subject that were more contentious and I didn't want to take over Ed's blog with my ramblings.

It isn't Notes that is threatened. It's Domino. Look at the recent announcements:

• Sametime RTC Gateway
• Lotus Component Designer
• Activity Explorer
• Workplace Forms
• Domino Toolkit for Websphere Studio
• Domino and Extended Product Portlets
• Lotus Expeditor

It's all about Websphere. Where are the Domino innovations? IBM's lack of focus on Domino, while claiming it is a focus on Domino, is creating FUD. There is a roadmap for Domino and there has been a commitment to new releases for the next decade or so. The question is what lies along that road?

I'm not suggesting that Websphere is replacing Domino. When I look at everything laid out in front of me and I start connecting the dots, Domino's role and even it's usefulness isn't clear. End users don't care about the difference between Notes and Domino, and you need to look no further than the above examples to understand why people are willing to believe the rumor that Notes is dead. Strictly speaking, though, it's Domino that is more likely on a path toward extinction.

Notes MU Migrator download - CORRECTED LINKS

Here's the minimal version with just the EXE and the INI files:

Notes Migrator - 05 - minimal.zip

If you want the documentation, which is pretty sparse at the moment, you can get it here:

Notes Migrator 05.doc

Sorry about messing that up earlier, the link with the source code is disabled now. I'm working on a UI to configure the application INI, as well as adding more additional debugging and logging. That should be up by the end of the week.

IBM QEDWiki

I was reading Rod Boothby's blog and he mentioned this new technology from IBM. From the developerWorks Emerging Technology blog:

QEDWiki is a platform for collaboration

• Lightweight standards based collaboration environment
• Unstructured to Structured Data Definition
• Enables personal publishing

QEDWiki is a runtime for aggregated services:

• Dynamic platform for integrating “live” data
• Personalization in consumption of external services
• Application Concept (navigation, menus, install, config)

QEDWiki is an IDE for users to build ad-hoc applications:

• Consumes SOA services via Wiki markup
• Flexible visual drag-drop and markup based application development features
• Enable mark-up based client development

Here's a demo of QEDWiki in action.


And a follow up article from Zend's Developer Zone.

This, combined with the IBM Application Designer for Medium Business, shows a concerted move by IBM that mirrors Microsoft's recent announcements (via Gregg Eldred). There appears to be a desire to push application development down to the masses and I'm not sure where that's coming from.

The concepts are great, I just find the hype overwhelming. You can't force such a fundamental change through, it takes time. It seems like the analysts who sit on the sidelines want this to be the new new thing so they can be proven true in their predictions, but those of us in the trenches really want to take it slowly to avoid disasters.

I spent most of the 1990's cleaning up non-programmers' attempts at application development in Visual Basic and Access. Time will tell whether this is a good thing or not.

CNN report - Mainframes making a comeback

It's true: everything old in IT becomes new again. I caught this Associated Press article on CNN.com and couldn't help but chuckle:

Cheap little servers handle so much of the Internet's dirty
work that giant computers known as mainframes, which debuted
50 years ago and often cost more than $1 million, are supposed
to be passe.
...
[if] you were to break modern computing history into its
simplest terms, it would go something like this: There was the
centralized-mainframe era, and then there was the
distributed-computing era. And the former ended a while ago.
...
"For every application, many times it takes five servers in
a distributed environment," said Jim Stallings, who runs IBM's
mainframe division. "Many customers are saying, 'I can't deal
with the complexity."'

It's interesting that this also applies to Domino. One of my key complaints about a open source or MS collaboration solution is the number of products one has to implement and manage. Domino is the mainframe of collaboration software, in more ways than one.

The cool thing is a Brazilian game company called Hoplon is releasing a new game that's hosted on an IBM mainframe. Showing the true flexibility of a mainframe, they aren't even using their own:

But rather than shelling out precious startup capital to own
a mainframe, Hoplon is remotely accessing one stashed in an
IBM data center in Brazil. The same machine manages a retirement
fund for IBM's Brazilian employees and handles operations for
a building-tools manufacturer.

Now that is something nifty. Oh, and the game looks pretty awesome, too.

What can IBM do to make Domino development better?

In a recent blog post Ed Brill poses the following question:

In a world where the majority of new applications are being built in Java (and associated languages) and .NET, what approach could IBM use today to attract hoardes of new developers to learn Lotusscript? Isn't this the whole reason that Notes get labelled "proprietary" (in the tone of voice where proprietary = bad)?

"Hannover" will deliver the best of both in that the existing model will continue and be enhanced, yet the client will be open to new Java-based development methods. Thus the inflection point I mentioned earlier.

I don't want to suggest that there's no new Notes developers or development going on -- I get to hear about cool new projects every day -- but clearly it's a different market dynamic for developers today than it was when Notes became mainstream.

It's a tough question, and not one that can be answered without being a bit harsh. The short answer is you can't attract new LotusScript developers. It's a limited-use language with no future. LotusScript is a one trick pony, if you use it you're locking yourself into doing only Notes development, and the future of Notes by no means guaranteed. Using a general-purpose language such as Java or C# gives the developer more marketability.

The other major issue is Domino Designer itself. The IDE lacks features people have taken for granted in other development tools since the early 90's. LotusScript debugging is rudimentary and Formula, Javascript and Java debugging is nonexistent. New features have been tacked on over the past seven or eight years in ways that make them difficult to use. HTML rendering, which was introduced in R4, is STILL messed up. CSS support is spotty at best. A lot of this is supposedly being addressed with Hannover, but I'm not holding my breath. Nearly a decade of promises that it'll get better has left me jaded, and it has run off a number of people who might otherwise have embraced Notes and Domino.

It seems that IBM is forcing Notes developers into Java. That's fine, it's IBM's decision to make. I find it disheartening, but not unexpected. Notes and Domino are at critical inflection points. I appreciate that IBM and Lotus are trying to walk the fine line of delivering future-focused products while not alienating their existing customer base. I also appreciate people such as Ed asking these questions and not shying away from the scrutiny.