Market overview in the Lotusphere Comes to You strategy presentation

March 2 2007

(Note: I wrote this on Friday, didn't get around to uploading the presentation until Sunday evening...thus the date/time on the posting. ERB)

After three straight days of presenting the overall Lotus story, I've been thinking a lot about the messages that are in the Lotusphere Comes to You keynote presentation.  It's a little bit different than the Lotusphere opening general session, in that there's a bit more market-level overview included.  Four sides from the current Lotus strategy presentation have been good food for thought and conversation.  Today I'm writing about the first one...I'll tackle the others next week.

I'm sure the presentation is posted somewhere on ibm.com, but I want to focus on these four slides, so here they are from slideshare:



Perhaps these thoughts seem obvious to some of you.  Globalization, faster cycle time -- yep, sure, we know about that.  Some, though, may not have been as top-of-mind.

"Customers, and even competition, are better informed."  On reading it, you as a blog reader probably react with a "duh", but only because you are living that one already.

When I had my first competitive marketing team at Lotus in 2000 -- only seven years ago -- the game was played quite differently.  We had to install competitor products, read documentation, go to conferences, talk to analysts, and occasionally obtain a morsel of knowledge from talking to our own customers who used or had looked at the competition.  We had a great team that played the game fairly and ethically, but it was tough stuff.  It was made tougher by the fact that our primary opponent -- then more than now -- seemed unafraid to hit below the belt.  Anyone remember the ZD Labs POP3 performance study?  That "January surprise" (I think it was Lotusphere 2000) was like having BMW and Mercedes race it out for best 0-60 speed -- on the Mercedes test track, with low grade fuel in the BMW tank, and with a driver who had never been in a BMW before.  With a stock BMW car that nobody had a manual for.  No wonder the other guys "won".  

Back then, there was no way for the community to rally around such a sucker punch.  I couldn't tell the play-by-play in front of the entire market.  Nobody heard the guffaws of laughter coming from the Lotus building when Redmond offered to re-run the study, this time actually including us in the process.

Anyway, today, you -- customer, partner, competitor, journalist, industry observer -- have access to far more information (TMI?) than ever before.  And when a similar thing happens, a lot more people know --and can shoot holes in it.   I think one of the reasons why social networking software such as blogs, wikis, and shared bookmarks are so important right now is that we need, more than ever, someone to help us figure out what information is useful in the whole scheme of things.  This conected-ness leads to the responsiveness that is now more important than ever in most organizations.  

Now we just have to keep from overdoing it, and as such, I'm going offline for the weekend :-)

Ed Brill AA55, MAN-ORD, Seat 6D Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [18]

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  1. 1  Flemming Riis  | 3/4/2007 4:54:08 PM

    -We had to install competitor products

    That should still be the first task for that kind of teams/persons, not installing the other side(s) product is well arrogant in lack of better words.

  1. 2  Flemming Riis  | 3/4/2007 6:37:24 PM

    that didnt come off right, the point was its healty for the people to actually see whats going on different sides of the fence(s).

  1. 3  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 3/4/2007 7:34:35 PM

    Flemming, you are correct and as someone with Ed or at least in that battle for EMEA in 2000 I had 3 laptops and multiple "demo" servers at the office (VM was just coming to fruition). I had various versions of MS, Netscape and many more servers running, multiple OS's and even more clients running and not just learning, but providing co-existence with Lotus products too!

    So clients could not point to X and say, "you can't do this". Well we could, we do and somehow that just isn't enough anymore, you also have to be able to sell the solution, change someone's mind, alter their course.

    Now as Ed points out, clients are just as informed if not more so than the sales people and even some tech people.

    Maybe that scares some of you from finding newer clients.

    Maybe it doesn't and instead encourages you.

    Maybe it should scare you more than it does.

    If restaurants can "go local" with their offerrings in international sites, than maybe it is time for companies like IBM to allow more regionalization of solutions (with someone ensuring a potential to integrate to everything else exists) and maybe, the SMB world will truly get moving.

    Make good on what you say IBM, the world is giving you and Lotus another chance so make it a great experience all around. Not just marketing lip service from "trolley dollys" as my buddy in the UK used to say.

    I for one don't find the slides menaingful as it relates to specific software or hardware but business process and maybe that is the point after all.

  1. 4  Patrix  | 3/5/2007 12:55:12 AM

    is still on MS site

    { Link }

    The link to the actual study does not work however

    /Patrix

  1. 5  Axel Janssen  | 3/5/2007 3:24:56 AM

    I don't believe in news sites like digg, but "wisdom of crowds" work very well in discovering FUD in ongoing expert level discussions. The weak points of "comparative performance studies" are discovered very quickly.

    In 2003 or so there was a Microsoft study that claimed that .NET were 10 times faster in running Pet shop demo app than J2EE. In the end all this quickness were due to heavy use of difficult to maintain stored procedures (you could do that in J2EE to).

    Lately some axis2 aficionados "showed" with a comparative performance study that they were faster than the competiting xFire framework. The community pointed out quickly that with using other xml binding framework than JAXB XFire is quicker.

    The dramatically reduced costs to spread information about the flaws of such studies really changes the business environment for the FUD studies (good thing).

  1. 6  Simon Hayes http://www.notafreemason.com/ | 3/5/2007 4:45:35 AM

    I really enjoyed the presentation at 'Lotusphere Comes to You'. I'm interested to know where you host edbrill.com and whether Domino 8 features, such as the Blog template will be more widely available through ISP's. As far as I know only a few vendors, such as prominic.net currently offer the product. Since the price point for Wordpress and 150mb MySQL is only about $40 annually, is it possible for Domino technology to compete effectively in this market segment?

    { Link }

  1. 7  Steve Castledine http://www.stevecastledine.com | 3/5/2007 7:29:36 AM

    dominodeveloper.net will let you host with the blog template for free (last time I looked).

  1. 8  John Head http://www.johndavidhead.com | 3/5/2007 8:26:14 AM

    I find the issues covered here are very polarized when talking with customers ... people either live and breathe this new "information overload" or are on the verge of it, or have no desire to jump into those waters and want nothing to do with the technology behind it. It is hard to find any middle ground at the moment ... I am hoping some of the new technology from IBM and other vendors give people some options so people can get their feet wet

  1. 9  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 3/5/2007 9:40:58 AM

    I seem to find slides like these rather trite, honestly. Has there ever been a point in business when innovation WASN'T key to competitive advantage? "Information flows faster" isn't exactly a revelation. Information has been accelerating pretty much since the creation of the printing press.

    It's not like we didn't have global teams before the internet. They were just more expensive. But there was a time when having teams in neighboring cities was more expensive, too. It's not like some underlying factor has changed.

    Not that I think you should change the slides, mind you. Just that I personally tend to go cynical when I read stuff like that, because the implication that these points are somehow different than yesterday makes me laugh.

    Your ZD Labs example is really about the democratization of the press more than anything. The advent of internet publishing has made it far easier to fact-check someone slinging BS. But I used to do that all the time with MS whitepapers back in the day on notes.net

  1. 10  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 3/5/2007 10:06:31 AM

    @9 - I think you'd be shocked to your core by how many PHB types there are who are threatened by information sharing, or they have antiquated ideas about workers basically being unthinking cattle.

    Personally I'm thankful that Ed is carrying this banner. I've been saying the same things for years and it has carried little to no weight. I'm not sure what kind of impact it might have, but educating the resistant takes a while and if you repeat the same thing endlessly it eventually sinks in.

  1. 11  Geoff Clarke  | 3/5/2007 5:09:21 PM

    @ 10 What is a PHB type??

    Maybe I am one!!!

  1. 12  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 3/5/2007 5:14:53 PM

    From Wikipedia { Link }

    The Pointy-Haired Boss (often abbreviated to just PHB) is Dilbert's boss in the Dilbert comic strip. He is notable for his gross incompetence and unawareness of his surroundings, yet somehow retains power in the workplace.

    The phrase "pointy-haired boss" has acquired a generic usage to refer to incompetent managers. It is also possible to speak of someone being pointy-haired or having pointy hair metaphorically, meaning that they possess PHB-like traits. A company which has too many PHBs getting promoted to higher-levels is often called a PHC, or pointy-haired company. The academic version, a Pointy-Haired Dean (PHD), is similar.

    From Dilbert.com { Link }

    He's every employee's worst nightmare. He wasn't born mean and unscrupulous, he worked hard at it. And succeeded. As for stupidity, well, some things are inborn. His top priorities are the bottom line and looking good in front of his subordinates and superiors (not necessarily in that order). Of absolutely no concern to him is the professional or personal well-being of his employees. The Boss is technologically challenged but he stays current on all the latest business trends, even though he rarely understands them.

  1. 13  Davanum Srinivas http://blogs.cocoondev.org/dims/ | 3/5/2007 5:56:50 PM

    Axel,

    Turns out that the XFire folks were wrong again with their assessment.

    { Link }

    If you want to read a blow-by-blow account. It's here:

    { Link }

    thanks,

    -- dims

  1. 14  Axel Janssen  | 3/6/2007 1:24:34 AM

    Davanum,

    my real intention was the point, that the costs of diffusing expert comments about such studies is substantially lowered.

    What has happened?

    A bile member of different JSR expert groups of arabic descant living in the US (who tends to use mean language for people of all shades and colors) has made a comment about a study. And you pointed to a response .

    Thanks to this different voices we are getting a clearer picture of the studies real value. And as its cheaper to get a clear picture now, it is getting more difficult to spread FUD.

    Thank you for the link.

  1. 15  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 3/6/2007 7:44:39 AM

    @10 - I understand that there are managers who have issues with stuff like this. But they're the same ones that would have had issues with telephone usage in the 50s. It's not like it wasn't valuable to share information and push decision making towards the edges of organizations 50 years ago. The tools to do it were just more primitive, and so it generally happened at a slower pace. But the principle involved was the same.

    Again, I'm not trying to make the point that something should change in the slides. Just that they make me chuckle, because they present universal truths as if they are somehow revelatory. When someone says "doing X is more important than ever before" it usually isn't any more important than it was before. They're just selling a tool to do X.

  1. 16  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 3/6/2007 8:04:10 AM

    I think you are both right.

    We include messages like these in a presentation as a form of market validation. People naturally feel more comfortable hearing about new ideas when their current thinking about an evolving marketplace is validated as part of those new ideas. It's important for a vendor to demonstrate understanding in that context.

  1. 17  Davanum Srinivas http://blogs.cocoondev.org/dims/ | 3/6/2007 8:15:50 AM

    Axel ,

    Yes Indeed. I totally agree.

    thanks,

    dims

  1. 18  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 3/6/2007 2:17:29 PM

    Hi Nathan. These slides are not intended to convey a message of "this is something new that has never happened before". They are introductory context, to lead the audience into a mindset for the rest of the deck. They are like the first chapter of a book, or the first 10 minutes of a movie. They position the thought process at Lotus which is driving the directions we are taking. This is not a "product feature" presentation, like What Is New In <insert product name here>, and instead is about more about business and vision. I hope that helps. If not, come listen to me pitch the slide at ILUG? ;-)