The IBM Ver, Ver, Ver, Ver, Ver, Ver, Verse

Sorry Duran Duran for taking liberties.

By now IBM has done their marketing show to bring you the “new” email client called Verse. Those from the outside and even within will say it is the new iNotes or Webmail. They would be correct in that description. It is. But it is also so much more.

It turns out, for whatever cyclical reason, which is beyond the space time continuum, Microsoft, Amazon(?!), IBM, Google and numerous others are presenting new ways and formats of email. Oddly enough Facebook dropped their pointless email program…only to come back at corporations with a “business” Facebook. As I said in Stockholm right before they announced it, who would trust Facebook with ANY business information? Evidently Facebook thinks someone would. Just. Say. NO.

Is this truly a reboot of email? Did J.J. Abrams put you all up to this?

At the same time as we, and you IBM, are trying to convince people that email is ubiquitous and passé in the social/collaboration space, you at the same time hedge your bets with a reborn email client?

As a long time messaging adviser I am excited by all the new efforts being put forth. Verse will be on premises and in the Cloud. V’ger is coming to a desktop near you. Email that knows what you want, when you want it, who you want to work with and all your history. Cool! Right? Baby Watson under the covers?

We've been here before, remember Actioneer? SwiftFile? Numerous other software sidetracks along the dead product highway. So this is the modern  version. All those bits and pieces were building blocks to get to this point.

There is a Freemium model which is 15 years to late to many of us that have been on Yahoo or Gmail for an eternity, but then see the second paragraph above and you wonder if IBM has an idea here. What I mean is, yes, this all looks on the outside like an odd solution, but from within IBM there is a movement afoot to gain a foothold while Microsoft sleeps. My competitive mind says Gmail should be the aim, and maybe it is, but it seems that the IBM teams have a plan to expand Watson, as well as the rest of the portfolio.

Could we really be n the cusp of a product so expansive  that it would dwarf the existing ecosystem around IBM Connections? Could this truly raise Notes and Domino from the moribund state it has been hanging out in lately?

I don’t know. As much as I love messaging, I don’t think it should be all encompassing. Do I need to know that I email my boss more than my wife? Shouldn't it also be saying to me, “Go outside and play ball with your son.” Or maybe it should be saying, “abstracts are open for a conference that would fit well for you”.  I want real information that is useful to me, not just to business.

As an entrepreneur I can see how insights could be helpful, after all I can only read 1/314159265359 of the internet, if that much, on any given year so who wouldn't want some genius mind helping us?

Hang on, one might be thinking, you are over thinking what Verse does or will do. I don’t think I am. I am extending what I want it to do for me and isn’t that what the whole point of an email client is? To work for me in the best way possible? IBM researchers, and newer designers re thinking about some of these ideas right now, or have been the last 2 years and they want your input as well.

No doubt many reading this post will question my thoughts, but if you will suspend the “email” discussion for a minute, how about this idea….can Verse replace one’s manager?

After all, if it can tell me what I should be doing, then why would one require a manager? Is this another nail 

in the coffin for the middle managers and lower managers? Will we finally be the masters of our domains and be independent contractors within our companies to provide our unique actions to the greater company at large?

Call it what it is, collaboration, knowledge, experiential, whatever other synonyms for analytics that provides HR the ability to finally reach Big Brother mythical status. Providing everyone to be on a new level of productivity. A double edge sword which could be just one of many outcomes. Maybe it really is just another mail client with some nice extras that will require too much effort to build or maintain? 

Is this even feasible today? If so, it would require some serious efforts, which are being done, to bring some of these ideas to fruition. Automation, Artificial Intelligence, programmatic cues to trigger functions…all very HAL/SkyNet like to me. IBM is trying to reboot themselves, Verse may not be the whole solution....yet, but it looks to be a step in the right direction.

So come on, you know you want to try it out, maybe it will help you even get on Jeopardy. That would be an awesome way to get a large amount of people to use it by the way, hint, hint IBM.

If you want to play with Verse, go here to sign up and getan account.

4.3 Billion Emails in my Inbox

A few days ago I had posted some Tweets about my inbox being filled with some unreal amount of emails.

It was not:
a DoS attack
massive SPAM campaign
incorrect marketing blasts gone bad
large attendee confirmation for an upcoming conference

Actually I have no idea in the end what it was, but it was showing mails as far back as 2009.

I got this clip of the screenshot where you can see, what may well be a record for the largest inbox, just under 4.3 BILLION emails.

After some discussions, both hilariously funny and technical, the decision to uninstall the setup and try again fresh cleared the problem.

The moral of the story is, email is not dead, evidently my inbox controls it all, and an iPad with 16GB of storage space is enough to handle 4.3 Billion emails, or so it thought.

Got IBM Mail yet?

In case you were wondering, I have not gone into hiding, contrary to the trolls.

Want to just run this by you as I know someone out there has been scratching their head asking what is IBM talking about with all this talk of mail, mail, mail.

Mail in this case is of course, email.

You remember email, the thing everyone said was dead, like the mainframe?

Email, that scapegoat of corporate executives who live in fear people will realize their company is close to bankruptcy or some other financial catastrophe and so they announce a new email direction.

IBM spent quite a bit of resources, and will continue to do so, to keep pushing the envelope of email.

But no one calls it email anymore except us old dinosaurs that carry Blackberries.(Disclosure: I never owned one or carried one except for one client for 6 months) Seriously, it is now just mail.

But not just any mail, no, you have at least 4 variations of mail now from IBM.

Mail Next
The most obvious one, yet least viewed publicly, is "Mail Next". Simply put, this is a browser based mail product that runs on Domino. Think of it as a far ahead view of Webmail/iNotes/Domino Web Access for the next generation. Lots of analysts that get paid to write about it have, go read their posts if you want to know the future. This post is for the admins and executives that need to know where we all stand today and the near future. ETA of client, probably when R10 or IBM Notes Rnext comes out in 2015 sometime. IBM does not like to name products prior to launch.

IBM Notes
This leads us to IBM Notes which continues to bring in licensing revenue of an estimated $1.2 BILLION a year. As already stated, look for the next release in 2015 probably and as inroads have been made to expand the client repertoire to browser based Notes workspaces among other advances. Still based on Domino. No word if this will be rebranded as IBM Connections Notes or something else.

IBM Connections Mail
What is this IBM Connections Mail we heard about? Yes, IBM has re-branded their product lines again. If sports teams can change their jerseys and logos and colors every year, companies can change the names of products. IBM Connections is the new brand where the IBM Notes products will reside under. However, this IBM Connections Mail has been around for about 2 years now and it is a way to surface your email and calendar into IBM Connections. It is based on Domino and also runs for Exchange. It is expected that this integration will get stronger and span more aspects over time.

IBM SmartCloud Notes
IBM® SmartCloud™ Notes® is a full-featured email, calendar, contact management and instant messaging service in the IBM cloud. And it runs on Domino. For those of you that do not want or need an infrastructure in your office of servers, this should help you and while itis not free, it is pretty inexpensive.

So you see mail, or email, is useful and sexy again for those dinosaurs that need it and aside from one man, we all still need it.