All the Linux products that I’ve read of so far required you set up another Windows installation to be used as the Linux virtual machine, which means that if you want to dual-boot as well, you end up with two separate Windows installations.

Cheers,

- Mike

And I didn’t really think you had an IBM checkbook, man. :-) But I’ll appreciate any VC contacts you can point our way, of course.’

Still, there is an IBM ‘venture capital’ outfit http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03004c/businesscenter/venturedevelopment/us/en/ ; I’ll try and find a contact so I can let them know about you.

Many things we do are about “accelerating the commercialisation of innovation”.

“…to fix the user interface issues…”

Actually, I would regard Notes 8 and the “OneUI” initiative going on at Lotus right now as being the primary fix for this. YOU are fixing the interface issues — it’s just that end-users don’t know it. Their perception of Notes is 6.5 running with an R5 mail template and a couple of customer apps build by “George in Accounting” in 1998.

Sure, but that’s not what IBM needs to do. You don’t need Joe User to BUY Notes. You need Joe User to WANT TO USE Notes. Then he can pressure his IT manager and CIO to BUY it.

It’s a different game than it was when the CIO made all the decisions and his/her word was law.

“What would it take for Lotus911 (or another 3rd-party vendor) to fix the user interface issues; to provide the integrated 3D-graphics visualisations of collaborative documents … the ‘Second Life’ 21st-century upgrade to the Lotus WordPro, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Freelance that was all we could manage in the 1980s ?”

Check your email. :-)

“Can you take what IBM provides, bolt in your add-on, and remarket the enhanced version yourselves ?”

I would say we more than *can*.

“Do you need IBM to do more to facilitate it ?”

Sure. Send the check to:
Lotus 911, Attn: Nathan T. Freeman
1701 Barrett Lakes Blvd NW
Suite 400
Kennesaw, GA 30144

Another thing that would be really great is if IBM were focused, from the Chairman down to the mail room clerks, on getting end-user buy-in for these great products. Not “IT decision makers,” but people that watch TV, ride the bus to work, read People magazine and call their sister’s oldest son to do tech support on the computer they bought at BestBuy. Get them to go to work and ask why they don’t have all this great whizbang cool stuff they keep seeing called “Lotus Software.”

Those would be the two big things.

Technically, we’re almost there;if you uninstall Lotus Symphony and install a Lotus Notes 8 client, you get all the Symphony features (even the Symphony icons); you can revise your ISO26300 word processing documents, your ISO26300 spreadsheets, your ISO26300 presentations; you can rescue your old SmartSuite documents. The difference is that it springs to life as a collaboration tool; same as a cellphone handset when you start paying for cellphone service.

We’re then to the sales/marketing proposition. Selling one Notes subscription for one month for a handful of bucks isn’t going to gladden the heart of the sales manager; but it is a step in the right direction.

Selling a million, though, is what the business is all about. Very like cellphones.

What would it take for Lotus911 (or another 3rd-party vendor) to fix the user interface issues; to provide the integrated 3D-graphics visualisations of collaborative documents … the ‘Second Life’ 21st-century upgrade to the Lotus WordPro, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Freelance that was all we could manage in the 1980s ?

Can you take what IBM provides, bolt in your add-on, and remarket the enhanced version yourselves ?

Do you need IBM to do more to facilitate it ?

In the 80s, it was necessary to convince the CEO or the CFO that your solution was the best for the business, and that is what would be implemented — top-down, by executive fiat.

In the 90s, as what constituted a “business solution” changed from pure back office calculations into softer data management, and we saw the rise of “productivity tools” and email as a mass form of communication, these same top-down approaches lost a good deal of their power. When business value is generated by the individual creative process of writing prose, creating a new analysis process or building strategy slides in a presentation — then the creator’s experience with those tools determines their level of success. No longer was it a matter of merely typing numbers into a pre-ordained box on a greenscreen. The “knowledge worker” spent time in individual creative efforts and communicating those efforts with colleagues. Enterprises created VPs of IT and even CIOs to define how this creativity would be facilitated.

In the current decade, the priority has become all about relationships. And relationships are the most fluid and successful when there’s nothing to get in the way of them. That means that the user experience in moving from individual creative efforts into social creative efforts must be invisible.

It is difficult to impose, top-down, a facility for individual creativity. It is IMPOSSIBLE to impose social creativity from the top. Collaboration is, by it’s very nature, a choice among disparate individuals on what and how they share with whom.

People tried to do that in the 90s. It was known as “knowledge management,” and it almost completely failed. It *did* completely fail in organizations smaller than about 5000.

So today, IBM has in it’s Lotus brand the world’s most powerful, flexible and reliable tools for doing business in a collaborative setting. You truly have the engineering offering for the 2010 decade.

But you’re selling it like BUSINESS MACHINES. It’s as if it’s still the 80s, and the only person you need to convince is the CEO or the CIO. And because of that, the people that actually use these tools for hours everyday, and are responsible for generating the team creativity that drives business value, have NO IDEA how they ought to work. Why should they? The only people IBM shows it to are CIOs.

And therefore all those people that should be working at the speed of thought with these incredible tools instead see them as a burden. That’s why Notes has a reputation as “that miserable piece of software they make me use at work” instead of “the thing that makes my whole team get things done faster and easier.”

IBM doesn’t need to go to market with consumer solutions. But they need to start marketing AS IF they had consumer solutions, because there is no difference today between an end-user and a consumer. They are the same.

In the 80s, the CEO was the decision maker about technology. In the 90s, it was the IT department. But in the 21st century, the USER is the decision maker about technology. Sure, maybe they don’t sign the check, but they decide whether to use and support the infrastructure provided to them to generate real business value.

They are not machines. Social creativity cannot be achieved with a stick. Only with a carrot. I believe IBM hasn’t yet learned that.

Want an example? Why do I see television advertisements for IBM blade servers (relevant only to IT ops centers) and not TV advertisements for Lotus Notes and Sametime (relevant to every single user in an enterprise)?

Doesn’t that seem like a mass-market awareness effort for a non-mass-market product? Whatever awareness effort exists for Lotus technologies as an IBM corporate level is so narrowly targeted that even Congressional representatives and White House CIOs miss the message.

By the way, a quick factual correction: Symphony is not a platform that it’s quick and easy to plug Notes into. One could conceivably say that about Expeditor, but given that Notes 8 *must* run in its own Eclipse instance, I wouldn’t really describe it as pluggable… yet.

But there’s some great engineering going on in that effort.

You’ll find me, and my email address, in here http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/521/fitch.html if you want to know what I’m doing for the corporation at the moment.

Maybe it’s more precisely expressed as “IBM likes to sell to businesses and individuals who value warranties”. I don’t think that IBM will sell you a bare Lotus Notes ‘licence’; the minimum that IBM will sell is ‘Lotus Notes including 12 months of defect fixes’.

In a sense, that’s what keeps IBM out of the ‘video games’ business that Microsoft are in here http://www.ensemblestudios.com/ . If you have a problem with your game DVD, maybe it’s scratched and you take it back to the retailer for exchange; anything beyond that and you drop it in the trash. As a retail purchaser, you don’t build a business which depends on your ability to offer game-play; you don’t really want (nor are you prepared to pay for) a ‘warranty’ in the sense of expecting a Microsoft developer to show up and fix a defect which you think you have come across.

So it is the difference between “Commercial Home Entertainment” and “Technology for Business”.

I think the ‘brand recognition’ thing is some of the reason for http://symphony.lotus.com/ . No longer can you buy a monitor with the IBM 8-bar logo on the top; nor a Personal Computer with the IBM logo. And though the Personal Computer manufacturers put an “Intel Inside” logo on (when appropriate), the Games Console manufacturers don’t put an “IBM Inside” logo on. I wonder how much money would have to change hands to fix that ? It’s just dollars, those things that are “good for all debts, public and private”.

So if you download and install http://symphony.lotus.com/ , you get the IBM 8-bar logo on your desktop as a reminder that IBM is here and would like your trade. You don’t get the source code, and that makes it hard to take the 8-bar logo off. You’ll also get a ‘platform’ that it’s easy and quick to plug Lotus Notes into.

The thing about ‘warranties’ and ’standards’ is that conforming with an open standard makes it cheaper to deliver on a warranty. If you know what something is supposed to be doing, you can more easily bring it into conformance when you find it’s doing something else.

IBM’s prices tend to be high; but IBM does honour its warranties. And that tends to drive IBM into the ‘government and large business’ sector. Smaller businesses, and domestic customers, either don’t want to pay the prices or don’t believe that IBM will deliver on the warranty that is given.

Other large corporations do manage to sell to the ‘domestic’ market; ATT bills ‘domestic’ clients monthly for phone usage, and I presume they intend to make a profit from large numbers of clients billed for a handful of dollars each month. Amazon sell web services, and I think their ‘dynamic range’ can span from a few cents of usage to a million dollars of usage. I hope they manage to send the right bills to the right people !

But it’s hard for IBM. IBM would like to sell to everyone; nowadays there is the ‘direct’ channel http://www.ibm.com/products/us/en/ , and IBM attracts a number of business partners http://www-1.ibm.com/partnerworld/pwhome.nsf/weblook/index_us.html to broaden the reach ; but the idea of IBM billing for anything the way ATT bills for phone calls is ‘non-traditional’, to say the least.

Take a look at http://isc.sans.org/ , the Internet Storm Center, where they report on ‘broken’ software on public Internet, and the consequences. It looks to me as if the ‘breakage rate’ is exceeding the ‘fix rate’; if that’s right, the consequence is that it will end up ‘all broken’. For IBM’s clients, IBM charges them enough so that IBM can afford to pay software development engineers and global business servants to resolve the problems and enable IBM’s clients to stay in business in the face of it. But for people and businesses who aren’t IBM’s clients ? There’s not a lot IBM can do to help. Can anyone else ? And on what basis ?

I hope that IBM will remain an integrated 3-part business; ‘Hardware, Software, and Services’. IBM Chips for XBoxes, IBM Lotus Notes for professional commercial collaboration, and IBM Business Servants if you need to install Linux on all the Personal Computers in China. But balancing it, keeping all the stakeholders happy, is tricky at times. The trick is to keep each part profitable on its own, and that means exiting from businesses rather than dropping prices below profitability to maintain volume in the face of cheaper suppliers.

“Lead the markets you choose to serve” was a wall-poster I saw in my early career. It still holds good today.

Jimmy Bracco
GM – Lotus911

As a quick precursor, I’ve personally spent the last 18 years of my career becoming an expert in Lotus technologies, and our company is currently a design partner or managed beta customer on no less than 8 new products coming from that division. I was in the room when AT&T laid out their business plan for their take over of the IBM network to the initial 12 resellers of that service, and explained to them at the time that said service would be a flat failure because they provided no integration with this new business tool known as “the internet.” I’m also the co-founder of OpenNTF.org, the open source solutions site for the Notes/Domino platform, and co-creator of Bleedyellow.com, a public facing implementation of the Connections and Sametime platforms for Lotus advocates.

I’ve been around a while and I understand the history between IBM, Microsoft and Lotus. And while I agree that IBM’s vision and engineering has turned Lotus technologies into probably the greatest set of end-user business tools on the planet (given Symphony + Notes + Sametime + Connections + Quickr + the forthcoming Foundations and Bluehouse,) the continued attitude of “we make business machines” is leading to an erosion of user awareness of these brilliant products around the world. And since IT is no longer a top-down proposition (and hasn’t been since the late 80s,) losing the minds of USERS means losing relevance in the BUSINESS MARKETPLACE.

All this great vision and engineering is for naught if IBM can’t convince people that they want to *use* this stuff, and to do that, they must perceive it as a pleasant experience. It has to be almost entertaining to fire up your collaboration platform at work in the morning. And that won’t happen as long as IBM is sticking to the message of “we make business machines.” I’m sure that line of thinking will make storage solutions, blade servers and point-of-sale systems enormously successful, but it means you’ll lose ground at an exponential rate in the world of software.

Again, this is probably a conversation best continued via email.

Surely you dont need to boot Windows for that?

Mount partition in RedHat and do rm -rf *
or
Go into fdisk/gparted and kill the entire partition.

I took great delight doing the second one on my IBM Thinkpad back in 2002. Have been Windows free ever since!

phantomjinx