"Lotus Notes is cool" is gone for good
by Volker Weber
It's been half a year, since Darren Adams started notesiscool.com. Grass roots marketing for a product he tried to support in his capacity at IBM in the UK. With a concept unheard of at IBM: show the product.
That's history now. Darren has resigned from IBM and today is his first day at Microsoft. Best of luck to you, Sir.
Comments
notesmayhavebeencool.com?
It leaves a gap for someone to fill definitely. xPages is pretty cool even if perhaps the tooling isn't.
Perhaps Darren will start WindowsPhone7iscool.com.
He doesn't have to. Msft shows the product.
That was quick, the website is down :-)
The name servers for notesiscool.com (ns[12].hu-dns.com) no longer respond to DNS queries for the zone.
At least it just vanished, Darren could have redirected it to a . . . different site. :-)
I think IBM should have bought it for ten grand.
Volker it would take IBM 12 months to buy, it and a team of Lawyers.
When they needed to buy LotusKnows.com off me it was an incredibly painful process, and I just wanted it at cost. In the end the Lawyers and web team couldn't figure out how to do it, so it ended up with some former Loti getting creative in the process.
It did demonstrate to me that institutionalised IBMers have no idea how to be creative in their thinking outside the box to solve really simple problems. If there was no documented process, they couldn't do it.
Carl, as ridiculous as that sounds, somehow it doesn't surprise me one bit.
There have been VPs who printed a new badge of IBM business cards at Kinkos on their own expense.
Sometimes I am happy that the big ones work the way they do, gives the little ones room to do their business.
Its all 'Corporate Elephants' and 'Entrepreneurial fleas'. The Corporate Elephants cant react quickly to much, so they rely on SMB's such as us to engage with customers and fix structural issues with their delivery.
When Lotus had a functional Business Partner program (at least here in the UK), this all worked, and worked well. Its less functional now (IMHO) and as of the call yesterday, practically non-existent.
This new 'Domino is an embedded component of our even more complex middleware' approach means that BP's will have to be masters of all the moving parts. Which favours the larger service providers - only they can justify the large teams required now for this sort of action.
Difficulty is that they're also Corporate Elephants.
It doesn't bode well for the smaller specialist BP's, and it doesn't bode well for the customers.
---* Bill
