Good Riddance To IBM Workplace

ORLANDO, Fla. — DisneyWorld is such an appropriate setting for Lotusphere, IBM Lotus' annual lovefest for its customers, developers, and business partners. There's been a strong element of fantasy in Lotus' product direct direction for the last half a dozen years. But this morning there was a change, as general manager Mike Rhodin announced two new social-computing products, Quickr and Lotus Connects, that could be real-world successes. Even more important, he killed an old one, the poorly defined Workplace.Rhodin didn't make any announcements about the unmourned passing of Workplace, either from the stage during the flash-and-dazzle opening to Lotusphere 2007's 7,000 attendees or in the news conference that followed. He waited to be asked, and in his answer, I'm afraid he proved once again that hindsight is more ... flattering ... than foresight.

The original reason for Workplace, he said, was to shake up the Lotus Notes development team. Lotus needed to get some new ideas into its products, he said, and every time he brought some up with the developers they had a hundred reasons why they couldn't do them. Workplace, according to his version of history, became a stalking-horse, a way to set up a separate development team to do "out-of-band work for innovation." With the work done, he said, the innovative pieces are being folded back into the core brands.

"At the same time," he continued, "you guys [referring to the press and analysts in the room] were telling us we were confusing the hell out of you with Notes and Workplace and maybe there should just be one brand. So we made it one brand."

Truth to tell, it wasn't just the press that was confused. Lotus' customers also were confused as hell. IBM first announced Workplace about five years ago, a few years after it acquired Lotus. At the time, Workplace looked like a classic customer-base squeeze: Buy a company, force its customers onto your product (Workplace), and then dump the product (Notes), the culture, and probably most of the employees of the company you bought.

But it is a testament to the staying power, not only of Lotus Notes but of the customer community that has grown up around it, that it hasn't gone that way. What's happened is that the technology base of the product has transitioned from a proprietary client to an open source platform, Eclipse, while the proprietary server has transitioned from a closed system to a very open one that accommodates and interacts with the major innovations in computing since the Web browser — mobile devices, portals, real-time collaboration, and now social computing.

At the news conference, Lotus executives laid out five product announcements. Two of them are new and relate what Rhodin in the opening session called "born-on-the-Web" ideas about social computing to business collaboration applications:

The other three announcements covered well-established IBM Lotus products:

There's a lot of energy in the Lotus community, both from IBM employees and Lotus customers, around these new versions and new products, and the renewed focus on the Notes brand. Connections and Quickr seem to be aimed directly at reinvigorating Lotus' struggle for the collaboration marketplace with Microsoft — to good effect, according to Burton Group analyst Peter O'Kelly, who told the Reuters news service, "I think IBM is playing offense here."

Workplace is gone, and good riddance.