Ha ha ha. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. The brains trust at IBM have decided that the way to fight the Office behemoth is to jump 20 years into the past and revive Symphony.
Actually, only the name is being dug up from the grave. The old name is being stuck onto an old version of OpenOffice. Oh, and they have somehow managed to make this bastardised version chew up a whole gigabyte of RAM (as opposed to 128 megabyte for OpenOffice - WTF?!?). The beastmaster must be quivering in his boots.
But, "its free", say IBM. Well "free" somehow becomes less appealing to me when I have to shell out for RAM upgrades on my entire PC fleet, or I have to frig around recoding all my Office macros that will not work anymore, or I can't open any password protected Office files, or if I have to shut all my other apps just to get this furball to load. That's pretty expensive for "free".
Ok, partial credit for running with ODF for the file format, but...
The killer is that since IBM is not offering 100% fidelity with Office doc conversions, I have to manually check each and every document that moves between Office and ODF formats to check for crapulent conversion errors. I know there's nothing better for my workers to do, so no problem right? From this non-functionality alone, the product fails. Its not getting into my enterprise, and I bet it won't get into yours, until fidelity reaches 99.9% or better.
Are you listening, IBM? If you are going to launch a product with the "enterprise-grade" label, get the product to an enterprise-usable state that is acceptable for actual enterprises. Duh!
Am I being a bit harsh? Post a comment and let me know. But, until I see a roadmap from IBM that gets this frankenstein creation up to scratch I will remain suspicious. Actually, given IBM's track record at hitting release dates, I don't want a roadmap - I will not be happy until I see real code that really works.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Another day, another D'oh!
I am starting to realise that Domino is a lot more trouble than I first thought.
In Australia, saying you are a Domino/Notes professional is about as popular as saying you work as a telemarketer. And the career prospects of Domino professionals have been pretty dismal for the past few years thanks to IBM's lack of leadership. While other vendors have been making hay in what is probably the hottest IT market conditions in a decade, IBM has totally fumbled the collaboration market segment. Net result: learning Domino is not sexy and is much less attractive to younger IT workers than picking up all things Microsoft or J2EE or PHP or AJAX or whatever.
Another, but related, problem is that this comes after first confusing the hell out of Domino customers with their Workplace strategy, then came a long period of radio silence, then a long beta cycle for a product which is much fatter and more slowly than the previous version. (That's 'slowly' as in 'cutting two legs off a dog and making it run up a sand dune into a head wind'.) So the large customers are confused and uncertain. That means they are not investing in Domino internally.
Put simply, I know of no mid/senior IT execs or business managers who stand up in an organisation and say 'Domino is the answer'. What I do hear is a bunch of people saying 'Domino is just mail, right?, so lets just get Exchange and be done with it.'
And now it is too late. The large IT consultancies seem to have already decided that Domino is a dead business. They have invested in other technological products and futures. And they are telling their uncertainty-filled large customers to re-write everything in .Net or Java or whatever framework they have just trained their pimply-faced associate-level consultants in.
Am I being too harsh? Please tell me I am wrong. I want to be wrong. Lotus technologies were superbly innovative a decade ago. But now that IBM have assimilated Lotus the whole thing has been a bit brain dead. Let me know what you think.
In Australia, saying you are a Domino/Notes professional is about as popular as saying you work as a telemarketer. And the career prospects of Domino professionals have been pretty dismal for the past few years thanks to IBM's lack of leadership. While other vendors have been making hay in what is probably the hottest IT market conditions in a decade, IBM has totally fumbled the collaboration market segment. Net result: learning Domino is not sexy and is much less attractive to younger IT workers than picking up all things Microsoft or J2EE or PHP or AJAX or whatever.
Another, but related, problem is that this comes after first confusing the hell out of Domino customers with their Workplace strategy, then came a long period of radio silence, then a long beta cycle for a product which is much fatter and more slowly than the previous version. (That's 'slowly' as in 'cutting two legs off a dog and making it run up a sand dune into a head wind'.) So the large customers are confused and uncertain. That means they are not investing in Domino internally.
Put simply, I know of no mid/senior IT execs or business managers who stand up in an organisation and say 'Domino is the answer'. What I do hear is a bunch of people saying 'Domino is just mail, right?, so lets just get Exchange and be done with it.'
And now it is too late. The large IT consultancies seem to have already decided that Domino is a dead business. They have invested in other technological products and futures. And they are telling their uncertainty-filled large customers to re-write everything in .Net or Java or whatever framework they have just trained their pimply-faced associate-level consultants in.
Am I being too harsh? Please tell me I am wrong. I want to be wrong. Lotus technologies were superbly innovative a decade ago. But now that IBM have assimilated Lotus the whole thing has been a bit brain dead. Let me know what you think.
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