Informal Brain

If you are like most business users today you start your day here:

Then you typically head into your inbox and dig through a pile of email from the previous night filtering out the ones which are really important to your projects and tasks at the top of your queue.

IBM is experimenting with new social networking software for enterprises called Connections. Connections makes the assumption that the starting point each day is an activity feed from your trusted contacts and projects letting you know exactly what has been updated or changed. Think friend feed or Facebook newsfeed for the enterprise.

I recently saw a demo of the entire IBM collaboration stack and was impressed that they really do get it. Unfortunately the person demoing the solution started with the inbox, worked their way into instant messaging / communication and then finished with collaboration and connections. I was impressed when one of the younger members of the management team asked quite seriously: “When does the order of the demo change?” The IBM rep though for a minute and then said: “You’re right! Once we see the current Facebook generation enter the enterprise the order will change.” Ah I thought, IBM gets it!

The workforce is changing. Social networking will be the killer application for the enterprise and IBM has already made a significant investment to build out a workflow that starts with a social network, escalates to instant communication and falls back to email if necessary. That folks, is, the game changer.

There has been significant noise lately about Microsoft looking to buy Facebook. In my mind a smart Microsoft executive would see Facebook as the technology to round out their enterprise offering. Unfortunately it is not compatible with the Microsoft software stack and that is a problem. Microsoft is still sticking to their position that desktop productivity applications are the driver for knowledge workers. Anymore, the next generation will shun Outlook and will be far more comfortable interacting in IM clients and web based networking tools. Microsoft has not made significant investment in this space, and Sharepoint (MOSS) feels more like a 90s portal product and less like a game changing social networking tool. Even their experiment with Knowledge Network for MOSS has gone dormant since last summer and not re-emerged.

Today’s enterprises need more then collaboration, they need social experiences. People need to feel more connected to their peers then through document sharing. They want tools like twitter, and Facebook for the enterprise. With Connections, IBM is close.

IBM fell behind significantly with Notes. They lost focus on the user experience, but in some ways that might have helped them. It allowed them to re-focus on what is important to the upcoming workforce and not get stuck in the previous email client driven rut, and that folks changes where you start your day…

This is HUGE news. For the organizations who have not yet rolled out Office 2009 to their companies this is a HUGE deal. I think this is a game changer because it means you could have a dual strategy of rolling out free star office to the vast majority of the enterprise who are just consumers of content while the “power” users stick with Office 2007. For example, we saw a feature in the latest version of IBM’s Lotus Notes software last week which showed an embedded set of ODF viewers built into the client which in my mind eliminates even then need for Office on most end user’s workstations.

Microsoft was set to announce Thursday that it would make the interchangeable document format of a competitor available in its own market-leading Office 2007 software during the first half of 2009.

The company, under pressure from European regulators, national standards organizations and its own government clients, said it planned to give customers the ability to open, edit and save documents in Open Document Format — the main competitor to the Microsoft Word format — through a free update.

[From Open-Source File Format Is to Be a Part of Microsoft Office - New York Times]

About time! If live.com would have done this a year ago they might have taken on google. It is about darn time Microsoft realizes that the landing page is totally irrelevant, it is the quality of the search results and the sponsored links which drive value with search.

Now if only they could fix the number of times clicking on a sub link on the page puts you into the maze of home.live.com which won’t let you get back to the minimalist search page. *HINT, HINT*

The Microsoft Mesh project is ambitious but in my mind also lacking the real desktop sha-bam that we expect from Microsoft.  Where Ray Ozzie delivered an amazing P2P story with the groove platform, Mesh feels like yet another desktop to cloud file synchonization service.

What would have really knocked my socks off would have been a mixed mode web 2.0 synchonization story and a powerful P2P play which would have enabled desktops to work together over adhock wired and wireless networks.  How often are we in a conference room and we are trying to exchange files which might be stored on a web site, but oops we don’t have a connection.  However, a bit of P2P magic over an adhoc P2P network would solve it.  Now that is a Mesh story.

Perhaps, the real play is coming, with a true free Groove collaboration and Mesh integrated vision.  For now, it sounds like just another synchonization service.