eWeek Article on Lotus

Andrew Pollack and I are both quoted in this article in eWeek about Ambuj Goyal's first year as Lotus general manager.

I'd like to take this opportunity to expand a bit on what made it into print. When Dr. Goyal's appointment was announced, it seemed to me that his 'senior insider' position within IBM Software Group would put him in a position to mobilize resources across organizational boundaries and work out a lot of conflicts between the Lotus strategy and the messages coming from IBM's other software brands. I believe that this is largely what he has done. It seems to me that he spent the early part of the year conducting a reality check, and the latter part of the year adjusting the message from Lotus -- and from IBM Software Group in general -- to match not only what the market needs, but what IBM can realistically build, and what the technology can really deliver. With all the talk about "contextual collaboration" a few years ago, IBM had gotten way ahead of themselves. They were ahead of what the technology could deliver, and they were ahead of what the market could absorb. Don't get me wrong about this. I'm actually a big fan of the idea of contextual collaboration. I believe that the ability to plug componentized collaboration features into line-of-business applications will, in the long run, be the only compelling reason for customers with big investments in Notes and Domino to consider migrating to J2EE-based technology, the reality is that this whole area simply wasn't well understood outside the largest IT shops, and to a large degree it still isn't. Plus, there's no competition -- even from .NET -- creating any pressure on Lotus to bring true contextual collaboration to market before it's really ready, and it's still far enough out in the product plans that the hype just had to be dialed down for a while, and the message from Lotus this year has done exactly that. Whether that's directly Dr. Goyal's doing, or not, I can't say, but timing suggests that his direction could have been the deciding factor in the significant change in message from Lotus over the past year.