Black and White, the colors of a new millenium

Adam posted about color and what role/emotions it provides in logos and brands.

I questioned what does it say about iPhone users? they only get to choose between Black and White. Sure you can skin it, but by default why not Red apple color or Granny smith(never mind The Beatles would sue I guess).

Coke zero is black and white(and marketed to men specifically).

Why are (soccer)footballs black and white? Got to be better than, so one can see it in the grass.

Why are roads black with white or yellow stripes? Don't you think that the grumblings in traffic are worse because there is nothing but black out there?

All the talk about customizations and how this is the time for what you want the way you want it and some things still think like Henry Ford a hundred years ago?

Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black. -Remark about the Model T in 1909, published in his autobiography My Life and Work (1922) Chapter IV

Is it a case of not now, later or is it cheaper? No idea, it would seem to me that once you are dyeing or painting, color should be the same cost. If I was producing millions of iPhones I would provide a bunch in colors, limited editions or whatever you want to call it, to those that would pay for it.

I had the same complaint against HTC since all their phones are either gray or black or silver mixes. tried to get a yellow one, but I will probably order a yellow pouch, so I can find my phone at least. Any one else want a yellow pouch for Lotusphere let me know or watch my blog for some info how to get them in a few days.

Consumer Applications and Domino

My post from the other day received one comment.

And Ben Poole had this to say:

Who or what Business Partner has written anything to sell to someone at home?Who uses Lotus Notes at home?? A BP would only code such an app if there were demand for it, surely?

I say developers only code what they get asked for, usually, not always.

You never know when the next one will pop up, but ideas happen all over the place.

I keep a notepad, an old Lotus one of course, by my bed for late night ideas that hit me because by morning I forget them or the details sometimes.

So sometimes the ideas go far, sometimes short, but it's always interesting to read.

So some ideas for consumer ideas have been shown to be found at the iPhone Apps store.

What makes a consumer idea for an iPhone, exempted from being a Domino app?

One example to think about. And this is real life, everyday usage millions of people do every day. To be fair one(from my basic searches on iTunes) exists to do this in some fashion. Go lookup Bon Appetit from InovvaDev,LLC ($2.99)

Lunch menu's for kids in school.

Not only could you track the lunch's and potentially the costs to justify if you should pay for lunch at school or not, but imagine the opportunity for change or boredom by your kids...that's 30 days in a row of PBJ(Peanut butter & jelly)?!

Imagine the feedback the school cafeteria could have if they saw these menus?

I possibly see a bunch of parents buy one app. For $1(or $2.99) it would be worth it if they understand how it helps them too.

How many students are there in the US? Or the world? And parents that need to make them lunch? This wouldn't even be a dent in IBM's revenue stream, but imagine it as a BP, like I do.

Sure it could be done using Excel or any other database but outside of the yellow bubble and general IT people, the rest of the world doesn't do this normally, really they don't as I find out more and more I work with my kids school.

One Domino server synching all these menu's and providing quick lookups or reports to be emailed to parents or schools?

Just because there aren't any apps, doesn't mean there can't be or won't be.

We only have ourselves to blame if we don't change the way we see opportunities, not IBM.

Fud Buster Friday #39 - Apple makes everything easier

I preface this with the following caveat:

I do not personally own or use an iPod, iPhone, Mac, Apple or anything else, although I support them some times and really don't mind them. But think about this from a newbie perspective while you read.

So iPhone apps are everywhere on TV and I figured, let's see what one can do with an iPhone. Should be easy, right? Like finding Lotus on the IBM website, www.ibm.com/lotus go to www.iphone.com/apps, but you see this instead:



Hmm, ok, lets try the front end. Click on iPhone. That's better.
But wait...where is the app Store?

There is an icon for the App store. Now we are getting somewhere.
Hold on a sec, what's this:

Browse the App Store in iTunes

WHY? I now have to download a 70-80MB file and install it on my machine and it probably invades my startup files too?(it did)

Nice, how friendly.

No way to search or browse the apps from the website, you can see the top 10 items but that's not much of a help really is it when you want to find an app that converts tefachs(old talmudic length of measurement) to feet.

So I download it and install it. Evidently I had to wait for a bunch of updates since my first searches were limited in answers.

So now I can search and find things and found something really interesting so it does work after all. But I am still not very happy about what I had to do to find it.

You may ask, Why would you search for iPhone apps if you don't have an iPhone.

For the same reason why would someone search for a Lotus Domino application if they don't have Domino. And if they wanted to, how would they? Which option from that www.ibm.com/lotus page leads to actual applications which run on Domino?

Competitive purposes? Business ideas? Gift? Helping a business work smarter?

Perhaps because you want to see if there is any interest in a product.

It didn't make me want to be an iPhone, although I may one day, but it showed me a different view of proprietary or as some might say exclusivity.

Fud Buster Friday #9 - Religion

This post is for anyone in one of the following religions:
Democrat vs. Republican
Job vs. Outsourced
Imported vs. Domestic (Beers! What did you think I meant?)
Coke vs. Pepsi
Oracle vs. Anyone
Google vs. Microsoft
Blackberry vs. iPhone
Microsoft vs. Everyone
Lotus Notes vs. Exchange

Say what you will but there is a lot of religion going on in your life and mine these days.
Just finished Yom Kippur, a solemn day of thinking about past sins and trying hard to change one self for the better.

So I can relate to the problem of religion in the IT world.

Religions for centuries would impress on others to join their own, sometimes at the threat(and it wasn't just a threat) of various tortures and death, sometimes with bribes and others with a shrug.

Luckilky, in modern times we don't still do this...within IT, other countries is another issue entirely.

The put downs, FUD and other ideas put forth often times come back to bite the speaker.
You as the speaker look bad, I don't care if you are Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs or Steve Cohen. Someday, and that day may never come, the payback is going to hurt.

It is one thing to not confess everything, it's another to lie or just make up stories which aren't valid pr blame someone/something for no good reason.

Admittedly I may post thoughts to Twitter which at times can unsettle my Microsoft followers, but they are truthful in their wording, albeit at times harsh criticisms.

I do try to stay on the open and honest path and please correct me when I haven't! As happenned once with a post I made that was deleted because I didn't check all the facts.

So the moral of the story is if you must go and have converstions along any of the topics in the front of this post, just remember to play above board and try to be respectful of the other side.

iPhone Utilities for free?

So not only is Lotus giving away mobile utilities, Apple is now doing so as well.
Sadly they made a great effort to show Exchange is workign with the utilities.
While we know IBM had announced Iphone support, it appears now that was more about web browsing than "push" email. Nathan Freeman had a few things to say about this at his blog.

Windows, Mac, and Mac OS X go get them and use them.

The page says:
iPhone Configuration Web Utility lets you easily create, sign and distribute configuration profiles using a web browser.

Configuration profiles are XML files that contain device security policies, VPN configuration information, Wi-Fi settings, APN settings, Exchange account settings, mail settings, and certificates that permit iPhone and iPod touch to work with your enterprise systems.

For instructions on how to use iPhone Configuration Web Utility, see the iPhone and iPod touch Enterprise Deployment Guide, available for downloading at:
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/

The problem is there is no Enterprise guide, no matter how many clicks or links send you in circles. Perhaps a joke to all the Enterprise people to lighten up and see that you don't need a whole infrastrcuture from RIM to support these.

Perhaps my post from yesterday is more knowing than I that it was at the time.

CIO Magazine quotes me regarding the iPhone

Al Sacco wrote the article, and I had responded with my thoughts about the discussion being rather funny.
What makes a phone a corproate item? For that matter what makes a laptop?

I enjoyed seeing he printed my thoughts about a BES like server for iPhones, called an MIS. Read and enjoy.

Iphone lovers, I am not against it or for it, but it was nie to know Lotus was teh first to work with it.

Training is Done! What did we learn?

I hope the people I trained over the last 2 days retain some of what we discussed. Sure they have the books and notes but will they make changes?
I tried to impress upon them that they, and their manager, can change the world. But it gets done in a process one step at a time. Can't do everything in a day.
What was interesting was the feeling from them that they are just the IT guys and have no input to the workings of business, even if they may know h0w to perform many of the non-IT jobs in the company.
If they decided to propose a solution to something to the proper(and listening) executives they would probably get further in their careers. I hope they follow this path, it leads to great rewards and at least a Lotus Exige(MSRP $56,990) in their future like the one we saw at lunch.

It's a shame when good people can't see their future.
Many of us have this, we can't see how we can make a difference or produce more revenue, sell more tickets/seats/cars/licenses.
Few have the ability to see the open seas amid the storm, find the correct route and lead a course to a better life or way of working.
Still others are perfectly content in their livelihood or place in life and that works as well.

As we edge closer to Lotusphere, my thoughts are of course on business development and you can't gain clients in Orlando if you just have the feeling your "just a Lotus guy or girl."

Open up your mind and see the Evangelist inside and realize everyone you meet is also and that is a bond which does not come easy in many other software brands. You are your companies evangelist, gather your knowledge!

Lastly, for all those that complain there is no corporate solution for iPhones....
Lotus gets hip again by being on the iPhones as a corporate solution, this should get interesting very quickly now.

La La La La ...Lemon

From my Partner connections blog since not everyone can read it there.

Yes, it's Berts favorite song from Sesame Street! Why? I think out of the box sometimes.
A bit off evangelism, although not entirely (see my public blog for the latest on that one by clicking the logo) today.
I have a theory, which I espoused with Ian White who was blogging here for a while.
Why is it all great smartphones so to speak, come from companies that are named after or for a fruit? Apple, Blackberry(RIM) and probably many more.
Then there is Motorola that just names phones like a bad personallzed license plate!
So the next phone to bring joy to the world should be called strawberry (although RIM probably bought the rights to it) or maybe a Melon (if you ever saw the Back to School movie you might get the reference.
But I think the world is ready for the Lemon phone. Smells good thanks to the citrus bark used to line the inner casing. Can always be found in the dark thanks to a yellow hue that glows(it is NOT radiation), a pebble grain casing(like the skin of a lemon) to give it good gripping power on your dashboard or hand.
Inside it would only work with Lotus, well because you can do these things, just ask RIM or PALM about exclusive clients. And it would run all your notes apps without havng to rewrite them since it actually runs an eclipse version of R8.
So why a Lemon, because no one would ever expect it to work and think of all the fun the press would have with it.
BUT THE THING WOULD WORK! Just not for Exchange.
So why not do it? IBM surely can get someone (Nokia preferably because they grok UI) to work it out.
Stranger things have occurred in life and maybe, just maybe, the mass commercial world, not just business, would also want it. Get Connectria or Prominic and all the other Domino hosters to help set up the network for it.
Would it be so bad to obtain a few million Lotus clients.
After all it's a fruit and everyone likes to turn lemons into lemonade.

Politics and IT don't mix

YEs, it's true, fire and water don't mix. IT and politics are almost as close.
Many company IT groups are run to just fix the problem, rarely creating the solution.
This has changed in the last few years, yet we still hear and read about companies that make a decision, then justify it on the public side.

Why do they do this? Why can't they just come out and say, hey Apple said they would personalize one in gold for me so we are buying 10,000 iPhones for the company.
Who cares if there is no great integration to our email and calendar I only cared about the personalized gold phone!

Now this may be reality for some people(I hope not) but for most ofus the truth is someplace in between.
So how can we play fair or cunningly at least so IT can trounce politics?
Well you could start by shutting the executive BES server down for 5 minutes to get their attention. :-) (just kidding, but you know the next time you need to work on a weekend..)
Now who holds the upper hand?
Should IT hold a company up because of a bad political decision? I don't know, but I would be willing to try it, perhaps in a different way.

In one client I recently finished a project their BES went down, HARD and so did a server of execs email. Bummer for them they were running Exchange and had NO way for the 100's of them at a major corporate event in Las Vegas to connect and they were very upset.

Being the Lotus evangelist that I am, aside from trying to help, I suggested in my report and to a few people that had they kept Domino as their mail server not only could I have rerouted all of them to their backup server (passthru options, cluster backup, many routes would have done it and even load http so they could webmail) in minutes, they might not have ever known there was a problem.
True story, ending was 5 hours later they got back on line. Estimated loss of business functional time in salary alone($45,000+) and lost revenue from the deals going on estimated because it was a 5,000 suppliers meeting to be anout $850,000.
That my friends is lost revenue, accounts, business, time you can add more to this cost.
And a cost which I would not want to be told by my CEO. Does Domino crash? I will not deny it can, but the built in and properly configured redundancy even if you only have 2 servers is excellent.
Did this change their perspectives, yes and no, some IT managers asked me more questions and we discussed possible scenarios, all of which I had covered already because they are BUILT IN TO DOMINO. Few of which had been done on the Exchange side, if at all possible because it required more pieces of the MS puzzle.
The SVPs were not impressed but then why would they, they either never sat in front of a admin screen or if they did it was too long ago to care.
Sadly sometimes it does take an emergency to make people sit up and think about their "corporate solution", politics have no where to go if your IT kills you for 5 hours.