Back from Lotusphere
by Volker Weber
We are safely back home, and we have pretty much survived the first day without sleeping much on the flight home. Travel on Lufthansa was uneventful, but Fraport was not able to deliver our bags to the baggage claim within a reasonable time frame. They eventually showed all up 90 minutes after touchdown.
Before the show Lotusphere was hyped to be the best ever, but I personally did not see much difference to 2007. It was very nice connecting with lots of people again. Thank you all for taking the time to chat. As you have seen there was a flurry of announcement, and in many cases my reaction was "finally". Finally support for mobile devices out of the box (Traveler), finally a reasonable SMB push (Foundations). Some things are half-baked (Bluehouse) or not so easy to sell as a stand-alone offering (Mashups). But we will have to wait and see on those.
One of my not so obvious take-aways was that after talking to Mike Rhodin I have the impression that he now sees the Mac as a "must have" rather than a "some customers do also have some Macs" story. You will be seeing a Domino Developer on both Linux and Mac. Not necessarily with 8.5, but Lotus will get there, or they might lose some developers.
A short note on Traveler: With 8.0.1 it will only support Windows Mobile 5 and 6, but there is already a prototype for Symbian. The developers also seem to be quite eager to see the iPhone SDK. If you need any of this, do talk to your Lotus contact.
As you can see, I am pretty up to speed with my mails, but my other readings leave a lot to be desired:
I still need to write my final Lotusphere report for c't over the weekend, and also need to start working on my presentations for edcom Nachlese 08, but I will soon catch up.
PS: We survived the Incredible Hulk, but only because we rode before dinner:
Comments
Indeed, bestever was the result of the excitement that the IBMers had in preparation. I concur with you, describing this year not different than last year. I expected it to be so and am happy about it. Last year was such a big blast, IBM needs a rest to get up to speed with all the new directions they took in 07. So I would have been suspicious, if they would be able to reach expectations, if they would have made yet-another-07-like LS.
Same as you say to the announcements: Finally, especially for Foundations.
the youtube video is not working :-(
