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Leading into the future
by
Richard
Schwartz |
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At Lotusphere '99, the keynote address was delivered by Apollo 13 Astronaut Jim Lovell and Flight Director Gene Kranz. I must tell you that I have not often felt such a sense of awe and admiration in my life, and I suspect a large portion of the audience that day shared my feelings. And I probably was not alone today in experiencing these same emotions when former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani delivered the keynote for Lotusphere '03. The Mayor spoke about leadership, and I can think of few others more qualified to speak about this topic.
Why leadership? Why did IBM want us to hear this particular message today at the beginning of a conference built around the theme of "The Essential Human Element"? The first principle of leadership the Mayor spoke about was "balance weaknesses with the strengths of others." I thought about that when incoming Lotus General Manager Ambuj Goyal discussed open standards, emphasizing the need to leverage investments our industry has already made. This commitment to open standards is the mark of a real leader, because it capitalizes on the strengths of others.
Dr. Goyal took the stage when Al Zollar, Lotus GM for the past several years, symbolically passed him a yellow basketball adorned with the Lotus logo. A troupe of artists who combined tap-dancing with a fantastic exhibition of fancy ball handling had given the ball to Al, leaving it spinning on his finger. Al has been a truly good sport at each previous Lotusphere during his time as GM, participating in off-beat on-stage antics, so this seemed a fitting way to make his final appearance. No blue was in sight, by the way, during this symbolic transition.
As for the rest of the opening session, I frankly think it simply went on too long, nearly an hour over the allotted time. There was a lot of good stuff, but here's hoping the choreography for next year's opening session is a bit tighter.
The major announcements of the day confirmed the roadmap that we've been hearing from Lotus lately. The first new products of the "next gen" family of J2EE-based collaboration were announced. I think it is important to say up front that every new generation must start with an infant, which seldom shows anything more than a superficial resemblance to its parents and is usually limited in what it can do. But eventually the infant grows, matures, acquires new skills, and meets or exceeds the capabilities of its parents. We unquestionably only saw the infant in the new next gen mail server product. What will it grow up to be? Well, we know who its parents are, and that should tell us quite a bit about what this baby can be when it grows up.
Meanwhile, the baby fills a niche because it can be profitable. There are huge organizations, in some cases with hundreds of thousands (or even a million plus) potential users who will never need anything more than the most basic email functionality. Only a fraction of their users need the full feature set of the Notes or iNotes mail clients. Today, such organizations have two choices: Give the majority of their users old technology that provides basic functionality but isn't integrated with the more advanced systems used by the smaller group of users and scales poorly, or pay the license fees and build the infrastructure to support full-featured email systems that will never return the value of the investment. Next gen mail is a new option.
Notes and Domino 6, of course, also received plenty of attention during the opening session. LDD Today has so many great articles about the various parts of Domino 6 that there's really no need for me to reiterate them now. If you've somehow managed to avoid learning about Notes and Domino 6 this long, check out the first three of the Top Ten articles of 2002 that are listed in the January issue of LDD Today. There was, however, something that did catch my eye during Alan Lepofsky's demo of Domino Designer 6. Did anyone else notice the bookmarks in his Designer client for the OpenNTF Mail Template and two different Domino Blog templates? Very cool of you, Alan, to subtly recognize the great work done in the Notes and Domino open source community lately!
Something else that I personally found to be very neat also happened during the opening session. People who have attended all ten Lotusphere conferences were asked to raise their hands. I only saw one hand other than my own, but was later assured I just wasn't looking in the right place, there definitely were others. I'm aware of a small list of fellow "ten-for-tenners," and I'm trying to get a complete list of names. Perhaps I'll be able to publish it here tomorrow. Stay tuned.
I didn't make it to any breakout sessions today. I'm speaking at Lotusphere this year, and I had to get together with IBMer Meredith Lovett (who will be sharing the stage with me) and my fellow consultant Dieter Stalder of STDI Consulting. Meredith was busy, busy, busy all day working in the Developers' Lab, so I organized my schedule to fit hers. Lotusphere is always the hardest working week of year for me, and it's that way for IBM developers too. Instead of attending sessions while waiting for Meredith's breaks, I spent my time on the exhibit floor talking to vendors. We did finally get together, and after dealing with the minor surprise of Meredith being unaware of Tuesday's "prepeat" of our Wednesday session, we sat down to finalize our slides. Our session, BP-107, is about controlling spam mail. Some of the last-minute changes we're making to the slides are due to the fact that there are even more vendors with anti-spam products here than we knew about. I discovered two more with anti-spam offerings today, and we definitely want to be sure to give each vendor one slide covering their products' features. We also needed to condense our slides because we've simply accumulated too much material on this obviously hot topic to fit within the standard Lotusphere session length. We're in the home stretch now, and I'm confident that we've got a great presentation. I'm jazzed— I'm ready—I've had too much caffeine today!
I'd like to close with a truly nice surprise. Several years before I started working with Lotus Notes, I was a software developer at Wang Laboratories in Lowell, Massachusetts. I worked in the group that developed Wang OFFICE email for the VS minicomputer. Quite a few people from Wang in those days moved on to work for Lotus. I've run into old friends from Wang at Lotus' offices in Cambridge or Westford on more occasions than I can count—so often that I've actually come to expect it. It always catches me by surprise, however, when I meet an old Wang acquaintance in Orlando, so far away from my home. It happened today when I ran into IBMer and former Wang colleague Emily Lee. I haven't seen Emily in quite some time. I knew she worked for IBM around five years ago, but I'd lost touch. It was nice to see that she's still there and to learn she's working on an exciting next gen project. I was reminded of the first time I bumped into a friend in Orlando, back in Lotusphere '93, when I saw Moses Peabody—another former Wang compatriot who's still a close friend of mine. Back then Moe attended Lotusphere as an employee of PictureTel, but today he's part of the Lotus Developer's Domain team at IBM. Moe is also a ten-for-tenner! |
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