IBM WebSphere - and so many familiar faces
by Volker Weber
Comments
Wonder if we'll ever see a video with Steve Mills and co talking so fondly about Lotus technology?
Nice movie actually. Still one has to wonder if IT Historians (if that is not a job description yet, you heard it from me first), will look back at WebSphere and label it as IBM's equivalent of Microsoft's "Let's bundle IE with the OS" blunder.
"Extend, extend, extend", but any other name is bloat.
Would love to see Steve Mills on a video saying the same stuff for Domino, but oh, we know he hates Domino, he was after all the guy that did tonnes of damage when he said Notes needed the DB2 database, hhmm how did that work out Steve?
That did work quite well. Lotus is well on its path to fit into Steve Mills vision of developing IBM software.
I do like the spot although for me they borrowed a bit from Apple (which is not a bad idea). Still (for me) hardly anything beats Jonathan Ive & Co. speaking about new (Apple) products.
That's funny. Don Ferguson, the "Father" of IBM Websphere, doesn't share their enthusiasm. When interviewed last year by the BBC he was asked "What’s the biggest technology mistake you ever made – either at work or in your own life?"
His answer: "When I was at IBM, I started a product called Websphere [which helps companies to operate and integrate business applications across multiple computing platforms]. Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control ... I tried to build something like a mainframe, a system that was capable of doing anything, that would be able to do what might be needed in five years. I call it the endgame fallacy. It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it. Because we were IBM, we survived it, but if we'd been a start-up, we'd have gone to the wall."
Overdesigned? Check. Now layer Websphere Portal on top of that. And now add IBM Workplace on top of Portal. Complexity Kills.
I finally got around to watching this. Wow, quite an impressive video. I can only imagine the amount of planning and work that went into getting all those people to participate. As others have mentioned, just imagine if the company showed that level of passion and unity around Domino. Oh what could have been...
Bob, perhaps that is because he's now elsewhere?
