Ed Brill has posted a blog entry where he asks for feedback about what IBM Lotus means to us, so hereby I'll share my opinion on this topic.

So, what does IBM and/or IBM Lotus mean to me? I'll be freely mixing experience and perception here:

• Lotus Notes and Domino have a special place in my heart. They are great products, products that I worked with in the first years of my career. Products that I'm still passionate about, even though I've been slightly out of touch with the platform lately. I'm not bothered at all by the fact that IBM absorbed Lotus, maybe because I'm too young to tell the difference between both periods in time.
• To this day, I still think IBM makes the best laptops in the world, the glorious Thinkpad, even though Lenovo makes them now. I have a very positive association with this hardware and therefore disliked the "move" to Lenovo.
• IBM in general to me is a huge company with huge resources and elite scientists that mainly focus on large enterprises. As someone pointed out in the comments at Ed's site, there is not a single product or service of IBM that I use as a consumer.
• IBM in general to me is cumbersome to deal with. I remember a few years back when I had to visit their Software Catalog. We jokingly called it sixteen-step shopping at the office, not even mentioning the fact that we needed to authenticate twice and had to spend hours finding even the most basic software. Another incident is related to their shopping experience. I once had to purchase 3 Lotus Notes seats for a very small customer. I will not even begin to tell the horror I had to go through just to BUY one of their products. I'm not asking for free support here. I have money and want to spend it on them, why on earth would you make this difficult to me? This only increased the perception that IBM is interested only in big customers. Note that I actually had few interactions with IBM directly, but those were very cumbersome to say the least.This is not to say that they ARE cumbersome.
• Speaking of few interactions, my perception is that IBM is quite out of touch with the development and user community of their products. I've been working at this large enterprise for years now, and pretty much anyone in the application development teams across the world knows me by now, yet I never had any contact with IBM or a representative. Whilst I did not really need that contact anyway, the contrast with this other company, Microsoft, is huge. Since Microsoft is in, without any initiative on my side, they found me in a matter of weeks. Now they spam me to death, invite me to free seminars, send me trial software and tech magazines, involve me in internal decision making sessions, co-fund proof of concepts, and their experts drive across the country regularly just to visit us and share news and knowledge. At all times they know which internal company events take place that matter to them. All for free, without any initiative on our side. I'm not as naive to think that this isn't in the best interest of Microsoft itself. Still, the difference is too big to ignore. Microsoft understands marketing, building communities, getting buy-in and spoiling developers. In my perception, IBM does none of these things outside the boardroom, and that's my story in what once was a 120,000 seats installment. Admittedly, I'm sure I could get some support and resources from IBM if I've searched hard enough.
• Another aspect of IBM Lotus being out of touch is in the products themselves, mainly the Lotus Notes client and Designer client. This has been discussed many times, and I'm seeing great improvements now, so I won't go into this again. I'm sure you know what I mean though.

In summary, I still cherish the products that IBM Lotus produces. I do have some negative perceptions concerning the support for small customers, developers and end-users, but am also seeing great improvements in these areas, thanks to the great work of Ed and others. Although I'm not in the position to give advise to IBM, I'll still give it a try:

• Increase your reach at customers, don't limit yourself to the boardroom. Get to know the stakeholders, key developers, key internal events, etc. Support customers at all levels and increase your buy-in. Oh, and give away free stuff.
• Give the development community the credit they deserve, these are the people defending your products every day. Implement at least their most requested features in a timely manner. Provide a development experience that is not embarassing compared to other platforms, and provide free express versions of development tools.
• Continue (and enlarge) recent initiatives that bring IBM better in touch with the community, and continue to improve the user experience of end-users.
• When you advertise in the consumer space, hire someone who has a clue what a consumer is, what they want, understand and what their problems are.

Whilst some of my ramblings may be perceived as negative, it surely is not my intention. I love IBM Lotus software, its community and only wish the best for it.

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