JerryGlover.com - On Domino, the Internet, and other things

IBM's Small Business Problem

Jerry Glover — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:15:52 -0400

I hate to stir from my long blogging hibernation with a posting like this, but last week I encountered the results of a study that I found, quite frankly, shocking. For years, Business Partners and others in the Yellowverse have harped on IBM about the company's marketing to and perception within the SMB market. At times, there has been productive reaction, but as often, dismissal of the severity of the issue.

American City Business Journals, publisher of local business-oriented newspapers across the country, conducted a survey of over 1700 owners and executives of small businesses (under 500 employees) to determine the most recognizable brands among SMBs. The survey brings IBM's small business problem into stark relief. Of course, most of us would probably be unsurprised to see IBM behind Microsoft (#8) or Apple (#2, iPhone #5) or sadly even Dell (#9), Blackberry (#12) and Intel (#13). But to say I was surprised to find IBM didn't even crack the top twenty-five would be an understatement.

I happened to be talking this weekend with a friend at a non-profit and the subject came up. His perception of IBM was one of being over-priced and completely irrelevant to their needs; after all, he's not looking to buy a Smarter Planet for his organization, just affordable, approachable technology solutions. IBM certainly has solutions for SMB, but he and the survey respondents seem mostly unaware of them. Smarter Planet jab aside, I won't beat the drum for advertising as the sole solution; winning mindshare in the market is certainly more complicated and multi-dimensional than that. I just hope someone, somewhere in IBM is looking at the small and medium picture, as it were, and this survey provides a clarion call to put a priority on the market.

View the top 25 or this other article on the survey for more information.

Air and Simple Gifts

Jerry Glover — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:03:43 -0400

A lovely gift on an historic occasion from tremendous artists. At once, clearly displaying America's diversity while celebrating excellence. It truly is a new day in America:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

We now return to your Lotusphere reports...

Two anniversaries

Jerry Glover — Wed, 7 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Today marks the somewhat ignominious one year anniversary of no posts what-so-ever on this blog. Having reached that milestone, it seems time to correct it. The last year saw many trials and, dare I say it, tribulations, but the past, as they say, is past. It's time to start participating and contributing again; coming up shortly, I have some thoughts to share about my experience with Domino on Linux, and my pet peeves about Notes 8. But first, the second anniversary hinted at in the blog title. A few weeks ago, several members of the Lotus blogosphere recounted their history with Notes and Domino and coincidentally about the time I was seeing those posts, I marked my own 15th anniversary working with this incredible platform.

I'm a technology omnivore.

Jerry Glover — Mon, 7 May 2007 10:38:36 -0400

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out yesterday describing a typology of technology users. They found that 8% of American adults are what Pew describes as "Omnivores". They say "Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones." I guess as a technology professional deeply involved with the Internet, it is no surprise I'm in that category although I blow the age demographic - they say the median is 28 with just more than half under age 30. If you're interested in what category you fall, you can take their technology typology quiz yourself.

Fascinating flight patterns visualations

Jerry Glover — Thu, 3 May 2007 17:23:09 -0400

Check out the visual documation for this project by Aaron Koblin using FAA data for flight patterns over the United States. The east coast is unsurprisingly the densest related directly to the population centers. Florida air traffic seems amazingly dense owing I guess to the flight corridors for originations (ATL, CIN, CHI) to Florida destinations cities aligning with the peninsula. It's fascinating to watch the air network "wake up" and progress through the day. Watch this and then think back to 9/11 and the days following when all this activity was completely stopped.

The week from hell

Jerry Glover — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:39:13 -0400

If anyone is tuned in to this blog, apologies for the continued radio silence; it's been one of those months and while it doesn't explain the weeks before, last week was the week from hell.

The preceeding weekend entailed a full day commitment entertaining a friend that was in from out of town and then continued work on taxes as they were due on Tuesday of course (and I had delayed knowing I had to pay). First thing Monday morning, not long after the Viriginia Tech tragedy had begun, I found out my paternal grandfather had died. Needless to say that caused a fair amount of chaos in what was already looking like a busy week. After returning from the funeral Wednesday night, I woke up Thursday not feeling well and got progressively sicker through the day.

This past weekend already had a minimum full-day commitment (roadtrip) for the christening of my godson which I had to attend while still sick. Because the sinus problems have continued and I've felt very drained for most of this week, I'm still catching up with blog reading at this point, much less writing, given there was some major action in the Domino Blogosphere last week while I was pretty much completely out of touch.

The good news is the primary project I've been working on is drawing to a close, and I'm going to be able to catch up on some of the other projects I've been neglecting, so there should be much more activity here from this point on. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Welcome to the Domino Blogosphere!

Jerry Glover — Mon, 2 Apr 2007 22:59:33 -0400

Ok, if you read my blog, you probably read Rocky's so you probably already heard that Bob Balaban is blogging now. No, not that Bob Balaban, but rather the guy who brought Lotusscript to Notes. Since his new job at IBM is to make Domino a "kick-ass development platform again." Because I am developer, his blog may very well be my new favorite in no time at all.

Also new to the blogosphere over at RezAir is an old colleague and friend who has been working with Notes/Domino since way back in the version 3 days just like myself. As you'll see, in addition to being a regular geek, Marc's a bit of a flight geek too. Perhaps he'll fit some Notes entries in between his air travel posts.

"Suite!" say enterprise CIOs about social software.

Jerry Glover — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:30:23 -0400

Via Nick Carr, Mike Gotta and others comes news of a new Forrester report on Web 2.0 that reveals 61% of 119 CIOs surveyed would prefer a suite of social software solutions from an established enterprise software vendor rather than a piecemeal approach using single function Web 2.0 technology from startups.

This is a strong validation of IBM's strategy with the upcoming Lotus Connections social software suite. Lotus Connections provides blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and activities in an integrated platform, any single piece of which could be used separately but are even more valuable when used in concert. Couple those tools with Sametime awareness and instant messaging and you have a superior toolset for leveraging newly discovered resources and knowledge immediately.

One small issue for IBM is that one of the surveyed technologies — wikis &mdash: is not part of Connections, although they are part of Lotus Quickr.

Why does Civic Duty come at the worst times?

Jerry Glover — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:04:42 -0400

I recently received a jury summons. It was marked as Standby, as were the two other summons I have received since living in this location in Atlanta. As the previous times my standby group had been not required, I figured the third time would be the charm. Indeed, that was the case and I ~~wasted~~ spent all morning waiting to see if I would be needed/assigned to a jury pool. I hit the jackpot (the odds were very much against me) after lunch and went to a courtroom for voir dire which is lawyer talk for "which of you suckers will vote my way?" Sadly, they did not complete the process today which means I have to go back tomorrow for more of the same. If I'm really lucky, I could be stuck in a trial for a week!

Of course if mentioned any details about the case here, I could be disqualified.... hmmmm.. sooo tempting.

I am just kidding. Jury duty is an essential part of our civic duty and a key part of our US Constitutional guarantees for individual rights. It did come at a very inopportune time however, as I had plenty of regular work to do, plus Notes 8 beta testing, a server to configure for Domino 8 testing, trying to get better up to speed on plug-in development as well as needing to explore other development platforms too. *sigh* Anyway, I promise some real live Notes, Domino, and generally technical posts on here soon.

SEC targets spammers

Jerry Glover — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:52:41 -0400

Via Google Blog, last week the US Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading on 35 stocks frequently pumped by spam email. Looking over the list of companies, I recognized a few names that I'd seen slip into my inbox. Personally, I don't understand people who fall for these pump and dump emails; just who buys stocks based on a random email from a person that they don't know?

I like the idea, but it would be even more interesting to see the SEC go further and set up a reporting mechanism or even a honeypot or spamtrap that filters for stock symbols and triggers a suspension automatically based on a certain number of appearances, much like the circuit breakers on automated trades.