July 10, 2008
How a community effort becomes polluted
A few weeks ago, Microsoft employees started making various claims about a specific look at market share on the blogs and elsewhere. Volker Weber decided to challenge the claim, putting up a wiki as a in-public-view way of determining the accuracy of those MS claims. Very quickly, it became apparent that the MS statistics were inaccurate, that a larger percentage of the companies cited use Lotus Notes/Domino for e-mail today. The wiki effort was a good community-led way of validating something that we as vendors can't necessarily confirm or deny -- at least at IBM, our customers need to grant permission for us to talk about their use of our products with other customers.I worried from the start that vendor bias could show up in the wiki, from either side really. I made a few comments in the wiki and edits of my own, either citing public data (such as case studies, news articles, job postings) or simply to correct an entry for a customer which I knew was a Notes shop. I even marked a few as Exchange shops. Others from IBM and Microsoft made edits. The data as it sits right now seems reasonably accurate to me, though blank entries, questions, or conflicting data do continue to exist. I don't think you get perfection, even with a community-edited data set, because different people hear different things. For example, the entry for Deutsche Bank says that they are migrating to Exchange in London, but another comment, from a person who just started working at Deutsche Bank, says he doesn't believe that to be the case. The reader may have conflicting information, but with some effort can ascertain a source and determine who do they want to believe -- a vendor, a company employee, a consultant who has done work there, a rumor-monger, etc.
I never expected this, though -- one of the vendors took it upon themselves to police the wiki, behind the scenes. A reader just sent me a copy of an e-mail from a Microsoft program manager, ordering this person to "cease and desist on providing false information" on the wiki. As I said above, the reality of some of these situations is that different people have different information. I am not surprised that Microsoft would have a positive view of a customer situation that a consultant working with the customer perhaps views differently. However, having a line employee (not a lawyer) send that consultant a private "cease and desist", rather than providing the data in public, is just raw intimidation. And it highlights, once again, the difference between the "we don't do that" (wink wink) culture at Microsoft and one where ethics and business conduct are a priority.
Then again, this is the same company where they loudly claimed at their partner conference this week to have migrated yet another 4.7 million Notes customers in fiscal year 2008, while at the same time announcing their Notes Transition Partner Program / "Notes Compete" for a fourth fiscal year. Explain this to me, Microsoft -- if you really migrated that many Notes users, how did my active Notes users on maintenance increase 10% from 1/1/07 to 1/1/08, while also seeing huge increases in sales of products like Domino Utility Server (where seats are not counted)? If your program to kill Notes has been so successful, why have you had to run it for four years now? All the while Lotus keeps posting year-to-year earnings growth -- 14 quarters reported so far. Where are your big new wins? How have your recent ones fared? Maybe it's finally time to give up the spin and put this bull out to pasture?
Location: Highland Park, IL USA
Very good post Ed, but I am not sure about the title - I think the point that you have (well) made is that the wiki is *not* polluted and attempts (if there have been any) to pollute it are not likely to succeed.
There is much talk about the Wisdom of Crowds but in this case it is the 'truth of crowds' where the power lies.
As for the Conference your problem is not what other vendors say, it is about who is listening compared to who listens to IBM, that I am afraid has been for sometime the crux of the problem
on 7/10/2008 12:15:15 PM -
I am surprised that you bring this up again because although the figures do not support the claim of Jim Bernardo in any way the result is, from my opinion, far from being all positive. And there are, so far undoubted, claims about some companies that are on the move (Total SA, Allianz AG, JP Morgan Chase, GDF).
By the way, Companies that migrate have probably stopped maintenance a long time ago and are being stuck on older version of Notes. But it is good to hear that the IBM figures for Notes are in a good shape and rising.
I do think the wiki is polluted. It's supposed be about messaging systems yet there are many companies listed as mixed because they use Notes apps. That's not mixed for the purposes of messaging, it's missed for the purposes of apps.
I added a few entries myself in the wiki and I applaud the effort, regardless of the results.
Ed - clear something up for me here - the letter from the MS program mgr was to a consultant? I am curious as to what legal standing the MS person thinks they have to issue such a letter.
@1 - Totally agree on your final statement. Who is listening and the perception of the masses is entirely the issue.
@3 - Honestly Charles if that's the only pollution issue we'd have in there I could live with that. As long as the data is able to be sorted and filtered it's workable.
@4 yes, the e-mail that was forwarded to me was sent by a Microsoft program manager to a consultant regarding a customer they both work with.
another 4.7 million ah? That's great, pretty soon their claims will add up to some 500 million seats migrated, which is way more than you ever claimed to have sold.
About the wiki, I said it on day one, there are people pointing to case studies that cover 1500 users in companies with over 80000 people.
IBM customers who are also M$ customers would like to see that email.
I'm sure the recipient of that e-mail would be happy to share it, as they did with me.
@3 if you really think that -- and you've complained about the wiki before -- get in there and clean it up! That's the wiki way!
@8 - I didn't complain about the wiki, I commented that I wasn't sure what to do about a company I had specific knowledge of. I went ahead and made that change.
In this case I was merely commenting that I think the data is polluted. I just cleaned up the parts I think were misleading.
on 7/10/2008 5:09:45 PM -
@9, I'm glad you went ahead and made the change. I think for the most part the errors creep in due to people miss understanding what data is being requested and also failing to make updates complete, e.g. adding a comment but not updating the flag. Mostly I've been just trying to keep things consistent. I don't see this as "pollution" so much as just distilling the raw data.
Kerr, I appreciate your effort, you've been very active making some things clear. But I think (not 100% sure) I've seen someone (not you of course) misunderstanding the same thing more than once,the same errors keep creeping in, if you know what I mean. I sincerely hope to be proven wrong about this.
@7 Hello dear recipient, My name is Vitor and I would really like to get an email from you.
@12 if you don't hear from recipient in 24 hours, let me know. If you do, let me know that, too.
@7 I would also be interested in a copy of the email. As a business partner I often have competitive situations and want to know what the other side does.
@14 - I agree David, for us partners this type of thing would be very much worthwhile to have a copy of, even with names redacted.
on 7/11/2008 3:07:19 AM - http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/IT-collaboration-technology-blog/
Surely, if true, IBM lawyers should be crawling all over it - it would an anti-trust matter?
@16 IBM isn't a party to this -- community effort, e-mail between Microsoft and a consultant.
on 7/11/2008 7:55:59 PM -
Interesting to see that so many Exchange shops still have Notes applications. Should these companies decide they need to save license money and phase out Exchange or Notes, it is easier to migrate mail than applications.
on 7/11/2008 10:42:59 PM -
@18 - yes I was thinking that this exercise shows exactly what the result of a Domino to Exchange migration really is - long term pain and support of two environments instead of one.
But you know I bet MS can still spin that into an argument that it's free.
on 7/12/2008 6:48:23 AM - http://playroom3.wordpress.com
Count me as another one who'd love to see said email
on 7/12/2008 11:19:27 PM -
@19 - I just got it. Microsoft must have declared their own standard meaning of the term "free" and the rest of us have just not adopted it yet. That must be it.
To be fair I did have a talk with a customer recently who indicated MS had told them it would cost nearly 7 figures to migrate to Exchange; <5k users, mail only. I nearly fell off my chair. That's the first time I personally have heard of MS attaching a $$ value to a migration.
@4 (et al) - In a nutshell, the e-mail I received from M$ contained a request to "cease and desist on providing false information" on the wiki that Volker recently started - { Link }
The "false" information (according to M$) that I posted in the wiki was a short comment related to a Notes/Domino-to-Exchange/Sharepoint migration of e-mail/applications at a client site. I haven't worked at the client site in question for well over a year. I stated in the comments that the migration effort was "going on two years" and the M$ program manager "corrected" me by explaining that it had only been a little over twelve months since he became involved in the project (which was obviously the project's "official" start date). It seems that migration planning, pilot projects, infrastructure changes, etc. don't count as part of the migration project. Also, I guess that >12 months cannot be interpreted as "going on two years".
I was also informed that the customers were "officially" happy with the migration and the project was going great (despite that comments that I've heard that contradict this "official" perception of the migration project).
Ed Brill has a copy of the e-mail that was sent to me by the M$ program manager. I'm not going to make it public, as I have neither the energy nor the financial/legal resources to take on a bully like M$ in a legal battle (I'm just a very small consulting company).
on 7/16/2008 1:54:15 AM -
@22 I'd be careful calling M$ a bully - they've been known to beat people up for spreading lies like that :)
Ian White on 7/10/2008 10:36:25 AM - http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/IT-collaboration-technology-blog/