Slashdot Mirror
IBM Wants Patent For Lotus Notes-Free Meetings
theodp writes "Over at IBM, the Lotus Notes team has 'invented' preventing the use of their own product during meetings. Self-described patent reformer Big Blue has asked the USPTO for a patent covering Suppressing De-Focusing Activities During Selective Scheduled Meetings by forcing meeting attendees to 'submit to the computing system suspension requirements.' What's next — a patent for Verizon for blocking cellphone usage during movies?"
Do you speak it?
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
If IBM patents meeting without Lotus Notes, and doesn't license it, then that means everyone will have to have meetings WITH Lotus Notes! Most companies don't have it, so now they'll need to license it.
The app seems like a verbose way of saying that the calendar system shuts down access to other apps during the meeting; which is a technical solution to a social problem (people banging away on laptop keyboards during meetings)
One part of IBM's strategy for patent reform has been to build as large a patent library as possible, but enforce only (what they see as) legitimate innovation while using the rest only to club patent trolls. While I have no objection to anti-software patent advocates, or full-blown anti-imaginary property advocates, insinuating that IBM is guilt of misrepresentation or hypocrisy with this filing is absurd.
I don't know of any existing products with this functionality. So they wrote it up first, and you're bitching because you lack the creativity or ambition to do so yourself.
For prior art, check out any MMORPG with a parental control feature, or firewalls with time lock options. Maybe there's a sliver of innovation in that it custom schedules it based on when your meetings are, but that's pretty thin.
Oh, you don't like software patents? So competitive corporations should just throw in the towel and abandon patents that are allowed in our current system?
No, my plan is to bitch about them to draw attention to how broken the system is until we have the support to legislate them away. Until then I support companies' rights to keep trying for these things, and the people's rights to mock them for it.
This looks like like a personnel management problem than a technological problem, and is easier and probably cheaper to approach it by traditional means. If one of your subordinates is goofing off with his email and not paying attention to you, tell him to stop. If he doesn't, call HR and determine the appropriate level of censure.
Indeed. We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer. Sometimes you have to realise that technology is not curing the problem, it is just solving a symptom. And like most diseases, it will simply evolve around your attempt.
Ryans Tutorials - A collection of technology tutorials.
This is a great idea if your some draconian control freak company. If your primary line of business is trying to stifle innovation and make your employees miserable please by all means get this software installed on your obsolete mail system.
The concept of a "mail server" is slowly becoming obsolete. With Google Apps a company can do exactly what they did with Lotus Notes or Exchange just as securely for a fraction of the cost. Why do so many people still run mail servers and their own BES servers? They have blinders on. The refuse to see the world has changed and left them in the dust. All the normal functionality of mail and even custom written apps for e-mail and mobile devices can be done through Lotus Notes. Except for those crummy little Notes Databases that I avoided using like the plague because they sucked so bad and had outdated information in them. BTW Ex IBM employee here!
I would love it if my company installed this software on my Macbook. During meetings I am quietly tapping away and working while listening in the meeting. I would be more than happy to give up my shell and stare blankly at the meeting presenters and take notes on my legal pad. And it would cost my company 2 to 3 times as much to do the same amount of work as during meetings which often don't pertain directly to me I would be getting paid to do nothing!
An even better idea would be to take away most computer users ability to multitask all together. We should have green screen applications that run on 5250 terminals so we can concentrate on one task at a time. Sorry Mr. Manager I am reading my e-mail your dying server will have to wait until I have completed and replied to everything before closing out that application to log into the server and see whats going on.
IBM has a lot of innovators that work for them. They unfortunately are beat down by the draconian middle level managers and idiots that could never survive anywhere else. Ah yes. The putty colored cube farm with the overly bright florescent lights. The crappy 15 inch tube monitor faced toward the cube isle so you have no privacy. The "clean desk policy" forbidding people from leaving items on their desk. The security team that sniffed the network like crazy and who would roam the cube farm looking for someone who went to the bathroom and left their drawers unlocked. What innovative ideas!
We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer.
No. Clearly the problem is that people are invited to meetings when they feel there is more value in doing something else than actually paying attention at the meeting.
Probably the best solution is to have fewer meetings and make them shorter and more focused.
If you then still need the meeting and making it shorter and focused does not keep the attention of the people involved, maybe they need a different job where they won't be distracted by such meetings.
I work for a large corporation and I believe we have far too many meetings that are not really needed. When I'm bored in one of these meetings, I like to look around the table and try to estimate the cost in salary and benefits of the particular meeting. With a VP, a handful of directors and several managers, a one-hour meeting easily costs the company a few thousand dollars.
This kind of technology won't solve the problem of people doing other things in meetings and it will most likely just piss them off.
The actual solution, assuming your not on a videoconference, is to just bring a magazine or book to work and read that when you're not supposed to be using your computer in the meeting. Or a PSP. They haven't invented a way yet to get disinterested people to be interested in stupid meetings. Even if you're face tp face, you can always just extensively take notes during meetings as a way to take your mind off having to actually pay attention. (If what I just wrote seems counter-intuitive, try it sometime -- extensive note taking both keeps you awake and creates a record of what happened, but it also enables you to totally turn off your brian and makes time pass quickly as you concentrate on things like your margins, handwriting, ink-pressure on the paper, etc.)
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Want people's attention during your meeting? Try a few basic things:
Start on time.
Get to the point when speaking.
Keep the discussion on topic.
If the meeting is more than an hour, have a 5 minute break for email and bathroom.
Never read your slides to the audience.
Then again, I dislike speaking in front of people, even if I do it well, so I'm quick myself.
And remove the chairs from the meeting room (unless you really need a multi-hour drone-a-thon). The meeting then gets to the point faster, and finishes without excessive blather and time wasting.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Amen. A lot of people also like to blame new tech for these kinds of problems.
Have we really become a society that believes that the only way to prevent anti-social or anti-productive behavior is to use tech and patents to make it impossible?
If a company doesn't like what people are doing during their meetings, they should consider why people aren't paying attention (maybe the meeting wasn't necessary) and if they determine that the employees really are out of line, punish them.
These days, we've adopted this concept that you can't punish people for incompetence or negligence, as long as society didn't do anything to prevent the person from doing what they did. Trust me, within a few years, you're going to see the first murderer use the defense that they are not at fault because society allowed them to purchase the weapon, or a child-molester who says "neither she, nor her parents did anything to prevent me from having sex with her, If this 10 yr old didn't want to have sex, she should have said so, or her parents shouldn't have sent her to summer camp.
Several studies have shown that the productivity of a meeting begins to drop off rapidly when you add more than three people. The only real reason for bigger meetings is to share blame. Fewer meetings is not the correct solution, smaller and shorter (but potentially more) meetings is. If a lot of people need to know what was discussed at the meeting then email out detailed minutes, don't require them to all be there in person.
If someone is not paying attention in a meeting, it means that they don't feel that the meeting demands 100% of their attention, and if that is the case then they are probably right. Rather than force them to sit in a meeting which only demands 50% of their attention on average, split it into two meetings, one where they do have to pay attention 100% of the time, and one where they don't have to attend.
If you read any management theory textbook written in the last 30 years, you'll see exactly this advice.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't really understand the business problem that this "invention" is intended to solve. If a manager doesn't want people using their laptops during his meeting... he should, well, tell the guy sitting ten feet directly in front of him to kindly close his laptop.
This is a technical version of your old college roommate leaving you angry notes to clean up or change your habits... because the person was too weak and passive to simply have an adult conversation to your face. A manager who has to "communicate" with subordinates in such a manner should not be a manager in the first place.
766,171 is perfectly legitimate. With older medical technologies, burying people who only looked dead was an unpleasantly common occurrence. A signaling mechanism more effective than the traditional "horrified clawing at the enveloping darkness and screaming unheard until your strength gives out" strategy was very much of interest.
Now, I'm not saying that 766,171 is novel, they might well have lifted the idea from somebody else; but it is hardly ridiculous.
The problem with software patents is that something like this is a great idea, but not patentable without much greater detail. Patenting "turn off non-sanctioned apps during web meetings" is hardly enough to go on. Such a patent would have to be much more specific... down to OS level hooks like how you're going to block screens from showing and restrict access to focus changes. The result would be a patent so specific to how Windows works that it wouldn't apply to Gnome or OSX.. and to "stretch" the patent wouldn't be right either because those systems do things differently.
I think the feature is cool. I've been in web meetings where somebody's email notification keeps popping on the screen... this could cause important "company private" information to be leaked, or worse somebody pop into their email while meeting then every body sees their mailbox. Blocking an app from showing during an web meeting is a useful and clever idea, without actually closing the app so the meeting users don't lose their workflow.
You clearly havent worked at any of the places I have. I worked at a cellphone manufacturer a while back (who shall remain nameless) and had access to a whole pile of sensitive information (including such things as prototype phones that had not yet been announced, ideas invented by the company and in the process of being patented, full source code to most of their (at the time) current phones and full details of exactly what customizations, lockdowns, restrictions and changes made for each carrier in the firmware for their specific phones). Some of this is stuff that competitors would love to get their hands on (especially details of upcoming products, new features etc).
Industrial Espionage is BIG business and companies DO care if this stuff is stolen.
If you are working on anything military, its even more strict.