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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.