My work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p that came with Windows XP and all sorts of IBM software that allows me to access my Lotus Notes email and get through the corporate firewall. As soon as I got it, I split the disk in half and have had various Linux distros on the second partition, usually Ubuntu. I treated that second partition as volatile meaning that it could come and go and I would just rebuild it if I wanted to experiment.
Last year I moved my family computer environment to be completely Apple Macintosh based. There are no copies of Windows on any of the machines that we own, but I do have a machine dedicated to Ubuntu Linux. Thus the work laptop was the sole remaining Windows installation. I’ve wanted off of that for some time for various reasons, some “political” but most of them technological. I love my Mac but I don’t have a Mac for work when I’m on the road. If I was going to get off Windows on the laptop, it meant I was going to get on Linux.
This last weekend I wiped the second half of the laptop hard drive and installed the IBM internal Open Client for Linux. It has everything I need for work: Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony, Lotus SameTime, and a couple of ways to get through the firewall. The Windows partition remains on the machine, for now, but I plan to live on the Red Hat Linux client as best I can (see below).
When I set up a new machine, it’s pretty much the same routine:
- Install and start up Firefox.
- Install my standard Firefox extensions and then sync up my bookmarks with a copy I have stashed on a server.
- Log on to GMail.
- Log on to my blog administration panel, Mint, Google AdSense, and Google Analytics.
- Run around to a few sites like Facebook and del.icio.us and remind them who I am.
- Try to get Second Life working.
Everything but the final item is working fine. T60p’s and Second Life can be finicky with the ATI graphics adapter code crashing. They seem to have gotten it worked out on the Windows side, but SL crashed the first time I tried it under Linux here. (Though it was working under Ubuntu the last time I attempted it.) The Second Life WindLight viewer tends to work if the regular one does not, so I’ll give that a try later. I may need to update the graphics device driver though I almost always screw up the machine when I do that. Unlike a year ago, I would not consider getting SL working on this machine to be urgent.
The Lotus apps work like a charm. They are Eclipse/Java based for the most part, so I didn’t expect problems. Notes seemed a bit slow until I realized that while I had built a replica of my mail file, I wasn’t actually using. That was a simple and effective fix.
I installed a few other apps such as FileZilla and gimp to starting getting the environment into the shape I need it for serious work. I installed PHP but have not configured it yet. I need that for fiddling with the source for this website.
I’m tempted to keep track of “number of days since last use of Windows,” and I may very well do so. I think that I need some exceptions to purely not ever using it:
- If I’m giving a talk at a conference or a customer site and I need to use someone else’s Windows machine to show the presentation, that’s ok if my presentation is in PDF or ODF form.
- If I’m doing something for my inlaws on their Vista machine.
- If I need to pop over to the Windows partition to get a userid for some service, like I needed to do yesterday for an app to get through the IBM firewall.
- If I go onto the Windows partition to remove applications or delete files (though I can access them all from the Linux side).
- If I go onto the Windows partition to prepare for removing Windows.
That should do, but I’ll let you know if that list isn’t quite complete.
If you are keeping track, my name is Bob and it’s now been one day since I’ve used Windows.
SL Update: The current Second Life Release Candidate, which is based on WindLight, does indeed work.
Good for you! You might also consider Linux Mint, which is an Ubuntu-based distribution that has become everything I wanted loaded in Ubuntu. It also does a few UI tweaks to bring buried parts forward in the menu. Here’s a review (of a new Dell running Ubuntu that might help) of a similar experience:
http://adventuresinopensource.blogspot.com/2008/03/laptop-review-dell-xps-m1330n-ubuntu.html
*Your* IBM Open Client is for IBM Internal Use Only. [link]
But the announcement means IBM’s selling them. If anyone wants one which doesn’t have the “for IBM Internal Use Only” legend on it, all they have to do is see their IBM salesman.
I think it’s advertised as being the successor to OS/2. And certainly it’s doing better in the market than OS/2 has done in the last decade or so.
Microsoft Windows ? That’s mostly a home entertainment machine. We’re business machines.
Very true, Chris, the linked press release mentions the internal deployment of Linux.
It also mentions “addresses customer demand”. One becomes a customer of IBM by agreeing to pay dollars (and IBM agrees to provide service).
That’s good ? That’s the business we’re in ?
“That’s mostly a home entertainment machine. We’re business machines.”
It truly saddens me that IBM remains so arrogant and close-minded as to think this is a distinction that matters.
CONSUMERS use your applications, gentlemen. Not MACHINES, but PEOPLE.
That being said…
1) Bob, the Notes 8.0.1 client and the associated Symphony and Sametime plugins work just fine in Ubuntu. If your internal staff has trouble with that, please email me at nathan.freeman@lotus911.com, and I’m certain that we can fly someone to you to help out.
2) I’m glad you hear you’re using RedHat. They strike me as the most serious Linux desktop implementation, although not yet the easiest. I have an R60 running as a secondary machine on my desktop, (It sits next to my Lotus Foundations Micro box, actually.) and while it is fully functional, it is terribly slow, with only the native Intel graphics chipset (apparently because the Eclipse SWT layer doesn’t yet translate native accelerated graphics calls on Gnome or KDE.) I would entreat upon you as an IBM VP to ensure that the Notes engineering team has all the resources it needs to maximize the non-Windows experience for IBM’s productivity and collaboration tools.
It’s all about the user experience. This is a maxim that IBM’s software engineering group, all the way up to Steve Mills, has reminded themselves of for the first time in decades. When IBM’s marketing group catches up with that line of though, all will be right with the world.
And seriously, let me know if you want some help with that Lotus stuff on Linux. Our organization has a particular expertise in this area, and we’d be delighted to help.
No, we’re not arrogant and close-minded. We’re slightly commercially inflammatory and looking for growth.
IBM and Microsoft go back a way. There was this IBM Personal Computer which shipped with the Microsoft operating system which became Windows. There was this IBM-Microsoft joint venture called OS/2. There was this marketing struggle between Lotus Development Corporation with SmartSuite, and Microsoft with Office, resulting in IBM buying Lotus with the $6B or so that it had received from sale of the Global Networking business to ATT.
However, that’s all over now.
Whenever IBM wants a Personal Computer, it buys one of the Lenovo ones.
Whenever IBM wants OS/2, it says to itself “Linux will do that”.
Whenever IBM wants networking service, it buys it from ATT.
Whenever an IBMer wants a copy of Windows Vista, he or she asks his manager. If there’s a good business reason, it’s approved. IBM does not buy 350000 copies. Same with Office 2007.
In the new ‘games console’ business, IBM (currently) manufactures supercomputing processor chips for Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. It’s a kind of re-slicing of the business. New things to do, as old markets saturate and collapse. But I don’t think there is going to be an IBM games console, and it seems relatively unlikely that IBM will invest to bring up a profitable business in developing and marketing video games. Never say never, though !
And yes, the user experience of things like IBM’s Websphere Administration Console does leave something to be desired, and IBM is investing in developing it. Submit your resume, or bid for a contract, if you’d like to help.
“If I go onto the Windows partition to prepare for removing Windows.”
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
As always, Chris is expressing his personal opinions …
Phantomjinx, yes, you are right, of course, I was thinking more if I wanted to go over there and make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything that I should backup or save elsewhere.
Chris, since I’d provided my email address, it would probably be a good idea to continue our conversation there instead of on Bob’s blog comments. I hope you’ll respond directly to me, since I don’t have access to your address (although I suppose I could ask friends inside IBM to look you up on Bluepages.)
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.
As always, Nathan is expressing his personal opinions … :)
Jimmy Bracco
GM – Lotus911
Nathan, can we keep it a public conversation ? I’m not saying anything that should be private; and you aren’t, either. (And assuredly I’m expressing personal opinions. Only managers can commit the IBM corporation; I’m not one.)
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.
Ah, Chris… you misinterpret my sentiments. I am not suggesting that IBM needs to change the target to which they SELL their software. I’m suggesting a change in the target to which they MARKET their software. There is a subtle difference.
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.
Well, from an engineering point of view, choosing whether to have Lotus Notes service on your Lotus Symphony ought to be as simple as choosing whether to have dial-tone service on your ‘iPhone’. Pay the month’s subscription and you get the month’s service.
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 ?
“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.”
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.
Let me amend my previous response…
“…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.
I don’t hold an IBM checkbook; I was thinking more of ‘hooks’ so that you could bolt your product onto a Notes client, add your value, and drive the market for Lotus911 and for IBM. If we’re missing a ‘connector’ that should be in the product, we’d like to know.
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”.
Great news Bob – I switched cold turkey I think in Jan of ‘07 to the internal client with Notes 8. One way to keep some Windows access and free up the rest of your hard drive is to run Windows in vmware (or KVM if you have a VT processor)… it’s a decent complement for anything that absolutely requires Windows (I found Excel pivot tables to be the only use for Windows).
My plan is to leave the system as dual boot for a few weeks, go on some trips, visit some IBM locations, and generally just work the Linux system as much as I can. If after that point I have convinced myself that I don’t need Windows, I’ll delete the partition and expand Linux to the whole disk.
Chris, no, from an engineering and design standpoint, Lotus is doing an absolutely stellar job. The problems now are with getting the message to the market.
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.’
Re: vmware etc, does anybody know of a Linux product that works the way that Parallels and Vmware do on the Macintosh? I.e., we’re it’s possible to access an existing Windows partition as a virtual machine, but also boot from that partition natively when required?
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