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Whirlpool Ditches IBM Collaboration Software, Moves To Google Apps
cagraham writes "Appliance maker Whirlpool has decided to stop using IBM's "Notes" collaboration software, and instead move to Google Apps for Business. The Wall Street Journal reports that the decision was based on both worker's familiarity with Google Apps, and lessening the IT workload. Because most workers have used (or use) apps like Google Calendar and Google Docs, Whirlpool's IT staff won't have to devote as much time to initial software training. This move lines up with recent enterprise reports, which largely forecast an increasing move to cloud based software. Whirlpool's contract with Google will cover all of their 30,000 employees."
Oh look, normal IT operations in a large corporation just happened. I don't see what's special here.
It's one company that has sent most of its manufacturing to Mexico switching away from another company that has outsourced most of its IT to India.
I've worked for IBM and had to use notes and other stuff. Everyone that was forced to switch from outlook to notes wanted desperately to switch back. Notes should die already, it's junk!
Shouldn't this be titled "Whirlpool ditches Notes, doesn't choose Exchange"?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Anything is better than Notes, I would rather chisel messages in stone than use Notes. Wish I was working for Whirlpool now.
I saw the first post was "what's so special about a company changing their collaboration software?" Allow the old man here from simpler times to explain. :-)
The reason why it's a big shift is because, at this point, Notes is beyond legacy status when it comes to email/collaboration apps. I don't know how much success Whirlpool will have with Google Apps, but I imagine their users will be happier. For anyone in the IT business in the early/mid 90s and forward, especially if you worked for an IBM shop, you probably have had some exposure to Lotus (now IBM) Notes. My company is still a Notes customer, most probably because of a sweetheart licensing deal or just inertia (I work in our product engineering group, corporate IT is handled separately in my company.) Notes was one of the first "groupware" applications, and companies built huge, complex applications for it. (Oh yeah, I forgot, that's the other reason we're still Notes customers -- rewriting the few remaining mission critical apps with tons of mystical business logic embedded in them hasn't been done yet.) Anyway, email was just another application, and it was never Notes' strong suit. One thing it did have that was very important for 90s era road warriors dialing up from the middle of nowhere was the ability to truly work offline and replicate messages when you had the chance. Outlook only got good at this around 2003, so Notes also had a pretty big following in consulting shops and places that had a lot of disconnected or poorly connected locations. Remember, kiddies, when Notes got its start, the Internet was still an academic exercise and as early as 1998 or so, slow dial up was the norm. That's the environment Notes was built to run in.
Anyway, IBM has been keeping Notes on life support for ages ,along with Lotus Symphony which it inherited when it bought Lotus. The latest clients have almost completely been rewritten in Java with some native front end code, and it's very slow. One thing Microsoft has done a pretty good job with is the Outlook/Exchange combo in terms of user responsiveness. But Notes still has some of the 90s look and feel in it, and it really seems like they gave the recent client upgrade project to a bunch of new grads in India (which, given that it's IBM, isn't a shocker.)
Notes is a good lesson in what happens when a formerly decent software product gets ignored for a long time -- a sort of "software rot" slowly sets in and competitors just keep adding new stuff while you stand still. MS Office isn't exactly the same thing -- they're constantly bloating it with new stuff; not really standing still the way IBM has done with Notes.
It'll be interesting to see how quickly Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Apps are taken up by businesses. It'll sure change the landscape for IT guys -- lots of my "professional" colleagues who rely on knowing strange obscure software features over systems engineering work are going to be very surprised one day when companies are just renting applications and need fewer in house people to feed them. I've seen this coming for a while and have been preparing -- even if the whole thing fizzles out, it's good to be multi-talented.
IBM moved a lot of them out of the USA
I was exposed to Lotus, then IBM Notes, in the mid and late 90's, and it was atrocious.
The users at Whirlpool will think of Google Apps as... the savior. And not because Google Apps is so good in absolute terms.
After IBM tried to replace RETAIN (A data retrieval system written in mainframe assembler) with Notes several times, and failed each time, they decided to just use it as their internal mail system to try to recoup their $6 billion. They're probably $8 billion in the hole now due to lost productivity. Lotus Notes did replace their old mainframe mail system, Profs, but Profs was better. Much better. Stabbing yourself in the eye with a spork would be better than having to use Lotus Notes for any length of time.
Really it's a surprising move on IBM's part, sticking to that stinking pile of shit. For a company with over a century of business experience and an otherwise sane-ish track record, it's a strange thing for them to get stuck on. Continuing on with an extremely bad two-decade business decision really isn't like them at all. They'd be better off if they pulled Profs back off the ol' A-Disk and started using that again.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?