Julio is moving
by Volker Weber
Carl Tyler reports that Julio Estrada is moving to Microsoft. In case you don't know Julio, he was one of the people behind Lotus Quickplace, the product that was redesigned for version 3.0 when he left to found Kubi Software. Somebody removed all the folding houses and other animations but still was unable to make it work with anything but Internet Explorer. Now take a look at the Kubi site:
Kubi Software is currently redesigning its product line. More information will be available soon.
This is an euphemism for "Our product is completely hosed. We have to start all over again."
In case you have not noticed, there is a trend at Microsoft to hire lots of "have done"s. People who have worked at competitors and presumably created products that could stand up against Microsoft. I am not so sure that this is a good strategy.
So what is Julio doing at Microsoft? A little birdie tells me: Lead architect in the Microsoft Exchange team. Comment from someone who has worked with Julio: "They are f*cked". Sorry, Julio, these are not my words. I don't know you good enough to have an opinion.
Comments
A lot of unfinished work on his way...
Not necessarily. Quickplace was finished. It was actually already in the second iteration. It was (and still is) missing a good retirement strategy for expired places.
Kubi is a different story. They were relying on the delivery of mail messages for collaboration. That is an assumption you could make some years ago, but no longer can due to the abuse of email for spam and the subsequent filtering.
Please also note, that it is not me who dismisses this move. I don't know Julio at all. I only met him twice (once in San Francisco and once in Orlando) and have no bad memories at all. I was actually rather impressed by him.
I did not want to judge about him. I met him a couple times in Orlando in the earlier days but don´t know him at all. But Quickplace is still missing a couple features making it easy to handle. Administration with xml files is not a real cool solution and support for external usergroups through LDAP is a mess. With Kubi i thought Julio and Mussie would get it working but running an additional server to have a kind of cool Notes extention was to much overhead. Using a kind of Domino plugin would have been much easier to sell.
