From outside the Lotus Yellow Bubble

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Outside the Lotus Yellow BubbleAfter reading Bruce Elgort’s blog entry, and Ed Brill’s response I felt compelled to write as a person outside the yellow bubble.  I am not a business partner, ISV, VAR or any other acronym, I am C1SQ5EN (sorry, bad download site joke there) – simply a customer, user, designer and administrator of Lotus Domino, Notes, Sametime and now Quickr.  The message I am getting from these recent posts is that there is certainly some recognized turmoil in the Lotii ranks. My question is how will IBM/Lotus react, and by that, I don’t just mean Ed Brill.

Ed’s response goes a long way to at least explaining things, but one of the most vocal complaint I’ve seen as of late, is about the download sites.   First and foremost, I agree, as does Ed seem to, that they are horrible.  But the “it isn’t my department” response I seem to be hearing doesn’t bode well with what I saw at the Lotusphere comes to you event in  Palisades, NY yesterday.

Where is the guy or gal’s connections profile that says they are in the download site department?  Why can’t Ed ping them on Sametime, and talk to them on the UC2 technology?  Where are all the dogear links to the people complaining about this issue?  Maybe all this exists, but I just don’t see IBM practicing what they preach in this arena.

As for the the LCTY event as a whole – it was very good, but I question why there were only four business partners sharing two small card tables on hand.  Was this their way of protest?  I can’t imagine, that in the NY Metro Area only four of them were there.

The lab setup was good.  I had a nice discussion with Brendan O’Sullivan about Sametime, and spent some time with a few others there as well.  Good stuff there!

One other comment I overheard and found a bit off-putting was “there is only one door prize with this many people?”.  If you were there just for the give-aways, or as a nice day away from your office, with a somewhat extravagant lunch (that was a little overboard IBM!), I hope you get fired. There are plenty of people that would be more than happy to be employed and actually giving a shit.  Speaking of that, I really enjoy using that term lately thanks to this excellenet blog entry).

Yes, it would have been nice to win a little flip video camera but I see these events as a way to get to speak with people I certainly normally wouldn’t have access to otherwise and that is what I did.  The demos and presentations – 99% is online somewhere.

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