Carl Tyler's Blog

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Today I'm back at Lotus Cambridge working on the "Developing applications for Lotus Sametime" redbook, or as it's new catchy name is going to be "Developing Applications for IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and IBM Lotus Web Conferencing". This place is so different to how it was when I worked here. Admittedly a large brain had started before I left in June 2000 with people leaving to join internet startups, but Cambridge now has so many less people than when I worked here, and most of them seem to be working from home. The place really has a strange atmosphere.

The LDB building on the Cambridge Parkway, that was the Lotus HQ (and my last office) for many years no longer has any Lotus employees in it, but apparently does have some consulting folks in an Websphere Innovation Center (WIC) on one of the floors, and Charles Park, which most visitors were familiar with, now only houses the Briefing center, with the floors above being available to lease. Which leaves Rogers street, at one point this pretty much housed the 1-2-3 development and QA team, the SmartSuite marketing team and some Notes marketing folks, the Lotus Shop (now gone) and not much else. Now everyone is in here, and even then there is still space to be had.

It's amazing to think how much this place has changed in such a short time. Sometimes I miss working at the old Lotus, but today, the Lotus I see in Cambridge feels much more like the IBM I worked for in 1988 when I first left college. For those that didn't know I worked for IBM for 2 1/2 years before leaving to join Lotus. Lotus was so different to IBM, it was like going back to college with the atmosphere, younger women and MLs (Motivating Lagers). Lotus really blew me away on how they could make decisions in hours rather than weeks, but also they let people take risks and often encouraged it, and sometimes we'd do things just because they felt right, not because they had been justified by a multi-million dollar survey. Don't get me wrong though, IBM saved Lotus, and anyone that believes anything different is kidding themselves, anyway that is in the past, now to the future...