Hardly. You might notice from the shot that Ed’s not at the podium; this was taken from the overflow room where they piped in the deck and the mic from the actual session when his presentation proved so popular that they ran out of room in SWH III. Apparently the combination of Ed’s blog and the content got a lot of people (myself included) out of bed for the first session of the day.
Lots of interesting points made by Ed and his copresenter Libby, among them “Why Notes gets blamed for things that aren’t its fault.” Ed and Libby did a good job addressing how to respond to this question, but not – in my mind – why this attitude is so prevalent.
The best point for me, however, came from the first person to take the mic in Q&A, who asked why Notes does not have a good tutorial available? Training, he went on, was the biggest single factor in TCO – with offices all over AsiaPac, brown bag lunch training sessions aren’t exactly an option.
I find this interesting not because of the issue itself – training is a concern with many enterprise applications – but because of the context. Notes, he said, needed training, particularly for Outlook users. But Outlook didn’t suffer from the same issue – as I captured it, he said “[his users] all know how to use Outlook they tell me because they use it at home.”
That’s a strong validation of the point that I raised here; namely that the lack of any consumer presence can and does hurt IBM in a variety of areas, Notes being exhibit A.
Notes for Consumers anyone?
