Just read Zoli’s post here, he takes on Stowe Boyd’s rant against IBM.
It’s become fashionable to beat up large corporations. I understand the feeling; having done my time in the corporate world I know I’m not going back … but that said, not everyone is a freelancer, startup entrepreneur or just “old-fashioned” small business employee. Most of today’s workforce are still corporate employees, and large companies produce most of our GDP, like it or not.
Thanks Zoli.
Stowe, may I be so bold as to suggest you should get a demo of the IBM product before you diss it? Perhaps talk to Ed, or the chaps at redmonk
This is what Stephen said:
With today’s announcement of Lotus Connections – née Ventura – and to a lesser extent, Quickr and Sametime, IBM’s is essentially informing enterprises of all shapes and sizes that a variety of social computing and collaboration technologies that achieved critical mass in the consumer market – e.g. blogging, social bookmarking and VOIP – are relevant to business users. Whether they recognized it or not
Could I suggest that you read James Snell’s post about what is going on inside IBM
Today IBM has what may very well be the largest corporate social networking environment in the world. We don’t know that for sure because there’s not a lot of great information out there about how many folks are actually using these technologies within the firewall. Here are some numbers: Our BlogCentral environment supports 25k+ registered users with over 3k+ “active” blogs. There are over 100k posts and comments with over 10k+ unique tags. Our dogear server has over 200k+ distinct bookmarks to resources both inside and outside the firewall and is generally more reliable at providing quick access to important resources than our Intranet search servers. Our activities server has over 11k activities with 69k+ entries and has 35k+ registered users. Generally impressive statistics, especially if you consider that use of the blogs, bookmarks and activities servers is entirely optional and there is no corporate mandate that Thou Shalt Blog or Thou Shalt Bookmark. Instead, a small group of people heard about it and started using it; they told some others about it and they started using it; then they told some others about it and they started using it… and it evolved from there. And it’s not just bookmarking, blogging, activities, and so on. We’re also podcasting, collaborating through wikis, tagging pretty much everything in sight, participating in internal “open source” projects, organizing “hackdays” and generally just having a lot of fun.
This seems pretty emergent to me. IBM is productising what they do in-house. With IBM publicly embracing these tools, it validates the market for everyone else. This is goodness…
Vendorprisey 