Category: March 2006
It took me the better part of a day, but I've caught up with all my RSS feeds.
I'm going to pick two highlights from it all, neither of which were actually Domino related.
The first is Andrew Pollack's take on the free DB2 announcement. He ties it in with the DB2 instance that's now available in Domino 7, and asks a very good question - we like new stuff, especially when it's free. But what are we supposed to do with it?
IBM can do excellent documentation - the Redbooks show that. But they have this huge set of product ranges which can work together, and very little "getting started" guidance on how to do so. Andrew's questions cut right to the heart of where IBM needs to do the most work in its developer/administrator education - newcomers.
My second choice is there just because it amused me immensely. You see, this is what happens when you have a bad architecture and try to end-of-life it. You have to reassure your clients that it'll still work in the future, because your marketing folks are too busy shouting about the future and disparaging the past and present. You have to direct clients to your new replacements, and if there isn't a direct and obvious replacement that's not an easy task. You have to remind customers that although you said that it was dead, it's actually required for older clients so they shouldn't do anything rash.
Oh, and you end up having to rework how your client product operates, and know that you're going to have to support this thing just because older client software will still be out there.
OK, so this is a very easy target. But the fact is that the simple removal of a poor tool that didn't deliver what it was intended to is evidently generating a lot of work here. This is a great example of why it's best to get it right first time, or at the very least cut your losses sooner when you realise it's not working out.
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 10th, 2006 13:35:39
A while back, Ed Brill asked how we keep up with the Domino blogging world as he summed up the first Show 'n' Tell Thursday.
Well, my short answer is... I haven't managed at all.
I have, at the moment, some 2017 RSS feed entries to read from Domino-related bloggers around the world. Those mostly date from mid-January, when I just became a bit too busy to read blogs anymore....
And that is just Domino-related blogging, by the way. A few SameTime/IM blogs, some Exchange blogs - but all of them in the Collaboration sphere and with some relation to Domino.
That figure is even more impressive when you realise that I've already skimmed or simply marked as read everything in my news feeds (Slashdot, The Register, Techdirt, Groklaw et al) and removed some blogs which I just felt I'd never read anymore anyway (Scoble, a few political blogs). OK, so the LotusSphere event brings the figure up a little, but it's still a nice healthy community that we've got.
It's not like I haven't been reading ANY blogs, by the way. I have a limited subset of blogs that I read at work, so I have skimmed a few occasionally. And Ed's Blog is pretty much the hub of the Domino Blogging Universe, so it gets read no matter what. But I do have a lot of reading to do now.
Comments (4)Philip Storry March 9th, 2006 16:24:41