2006-11-21 Ramblings
Tuesday, November 21, 2006# Nice to know there are other Domino developers who share my opinion . On the other hand comments in other places show there are still some Domino developers who just don't understand.
And look, the discussion even got the attention of IBM's number 1 Notes guy, Ed Brill. I let him know what I thought of his comments.
I went and listened to Ed when he was in Brisbane recently. This is going to sound very snarky, but I couldn't help thinking that if there was anything that could make you feel like you were on the loosing team, it was attending that session. There was nothing wrong with Ed or what he said. But come on, if Microsoft's number 1 Exchange guy was touring the cities the marketing sessions would be top class. Instead we got a cramped room, grated cheese, silverside and BBQ sauce sandwiches and left-over crap from Wayne Boxall's cupboard (I'm talking modem cables and old hats). Sheesh.
# The other day I tested a website that used a standards based approach to CSS (no hacks!) and DOM Scripting and discovered it worked flawlessly on: IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Safari 1.3 (I think), Konqueror (on a Kubuntu 5 workstation) and Opera 9. And that just made my day.
5 Comments
Oooh you have strayed into the line of scrimmage... looks muddy! Good luck. Hey if Domino don't want to play ball then come and be a quarterback on our team! :-)
I was there also. It was embarrasing to say the least. Demos not working etc etc.
Everyone I spoke to after the event came away scrathing their heads and wondering why they bothered wasting their time attending.
You're right, it could have come off a bit better. We ended up where we ended up because the largest room at IBM Brisbane couldn't hold the expected turnout. It was also the first day of my ten-day ANZ tour, which is no excuse but is partially why a few things didn't work on my machine.
The evaluations don't reflect the "everyone I spoke to" comment, as most were quite favourable (and had written comments to boot).
I would have preferred not to have any giveaways at all. I am not sure that other vendors would have done differently, but if we didn't meet your expectations, I apologise.
Hi Ed, thanks for commenting.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the kind of bloke who judges software by the quality of the lunches or the giveaways. I've been a Domino fan for a long time but Australia often feels like it's owned by Microsoft and the session definately had a feel like it was an IBM backwater or something. I don't think IBM marketing has ever matched Microsoft marketing muscle in Australia.
not all of us submitted the evaluations, because they did not make their way around the group. As I said, that was the comments I got from people I spoke to; maybe that was a small minority of the group.
Anyways I walked away frustrated. A lot of the issues Jake raises we face daily in our work. It has come to the stage where we are looking at replacing our Domino infrastructure. Which is a shame, as it could easily do so much more with some tweaks and updates. However, IBM's vision and direction for the product is not being articulated well in Aus and certainally not to a level of CIO/CEO/Managing Partenrs etc