Chris Miller: With the entrance into Social Networking with Connections, what will Lotus do as we get to 3.0?
MR: Challenges hierarchical systems, business systems could break down private information shared. dangers regulatory meltdowns on sharing regulated
upside is the transformaitonal power that could be pheonominal. seeing beginnings inside . global consulting business talent pool. find and leverage experiece is the competitive : The virtual worlds phenomenon is experimental but interesting. Innovate, a game on how to do IT training in a game mentality was cool. Get to certification by playing levels in the gaming, which appeals to the gaming generation. That’ a close system, but with multiuser and immersive experiences it can get somewhere. Research that Tivoli did around virtual datacenter visualization was very interesting.
I asked what is the most disruptive thing he has seen that he needs to, perhaps through this audience, get you people to pay attention to?
Social Software (I’ll link to someone else’s notes)
IBM Research is a great place for me to go shopping. Bluehouse’s live charting and Cattail file sharing came out of IBM Research quicker than before.
People are running from Domino and Exchange to Gmail, wdyt?
In September we announced hosted Notes. Logical thing. Domino access light is a good first step. From an SMB standpoint with Foundaiton, consistent UI, opaque if it is hosted or appliance to the user. More interest from different walks of business around Foundations today, a non-profit in Africa for example. We see it, recognize it, but we have a long way to go. Dont have to go on an 18 month lifecycle, doing it Agile with 4 week iterations. Symphony is on 6 week iterations. First question it the press conference was how did you get your team to do it so fast, a great start to talking about it.
Rob Novak: dependencies on Active X and others?
We’d love to work those out.
Rich Schwartz: Love the SMB initatives, they look real, but how can you solve the key problem — every month in my mailbox I get flyers from local organizations offering MS and Cisco courses, but never from IBM. What is going to be done about certification for small to midsize markets?
Not going to pre-announce something, but certification should be very high on my priority list.
In my day job I work for a large company (Colgate) and working on winning over the Microsoft camp. How are you going to overcome the toolbar for Outlook that you see on every popular SNS?
Started working on it, needs to be done. When you have a new product like connections, they (YASNS) are trying to figure out if they are friend or foe, but we are working it through.
A Scot asks, Lotusphere always has somebody fameous speaking, what happened this year?
Room laughs. I thought Bob Costas was fantastic.
Microsoft?
The last thing Microsoft expected us to do is launch Symphony and at such a rapid release rate. Microsoft is still running around saying they’ve got blogs. Now they are renaming things. They can’t compete with what we have got in social software. In addition to the client and catalog on Mashups is the app dev environment. 30% of Sametime deployments in Exchange shops.
Traditionally when they attack somebody they don’t expect people to defend and fight back. It wasn’t expected that we would have this level of investment in the brand. The development organization is the biggest its been, across 11 countries.
Bruce: Lets talk about the Notes franchise. Notes client has a lot of value, but how can we expand the out of the box value?
You saw the new templates in the Web 2.0 style.
Alexander Kluge: As a business partner, with Bluehouse, I am interested in what is in it for us.
Only started to show you the beginning of Bluehouse. Positioned with Foundations for a reason. Extensions to Foundations, taking content and putting it in a marketplace, but we haven’t talked about how it is a loosely coupled environment to allow you to integrate what you are good at into the environment.
Don’t know the business model and margins yet, will run experiments. What is right for clients, partners and ecosystems is unclear because of a radical shift in the value chain. All I know is the ad model eventually runs out of gas because there is a fixed amount of advertising in the world.
Warren Elsemore: Foundations seems to be competitive against Small Business Server, its a different bunch of people that who you are used to selling to.
When you open a new front in a battle you ensure your supplie lines and amunition are well stocked and you don’t telegraph your locations. We see some interesting new channel models that we are doing through acquisitions. When you acquire companies that are serving SMBs you need to listen them and expand the role that their channel partners play. Also some non traditional ecosystem lays in surrounding areas. Playing to win, agressive on cost, reveal TCOs. Easy to give it away when you charge $400 per copy of Office.
Bright yellow hair: last year was wisdom of crowds, this year it is emergence, how do you see lotus leveraging the social aspect that surrounds you?
Remember when we had Connections up last year and took it down after the conference? Our business partner community went non-linear, but had some concerns. 24 people from Redmond here. But we put it back up. Encourage everyone to join the Greenhouse.
