Carl Tyler's Blog

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I thought I would blog about this as I just read Andrew Pollacks comments about the opening session at Lotusphere and at the show someone involved in the creation and presentation came up to me and asked me what I thought about it. So being my usual shy, refrained self, I told them what I thought.

So first thing to mention is the wide screen, loved it and someone please ship to my house as it would be great to watch the World Cup finals on. Presenters, well the presenters were who they were I think whilst I loved Jason Alexander as I really like Seinfeld, for a lot of people from overseas they probably weren't even sure who he was. For Geeks you need scifi, Wil Weaton, Stephen Hawkins, Dr Who? Still I did enjoy him. For the Lotus presenters it was the usual problem, which is people presenting who are not professional presenters for a living using a teleprompter. Typically in this situation presenters come across as insincere which is no fault of the presenter, it's just a by product of using a teleprompter. Solution? For some the best solution is to use the teleprompter with bullet points rather than the entire scripted presentation, this works for some (me for example) but doesn't help others who become flustered when presenting to a large audience. Other alternatives are to memorize the entire speech and only refer to the teleprompter if you get stuck, and there is also coaching, learn the speech and then get coached on giving it, this takes a great deal of time though, which most of the execs don't have.

The demos, obviously there were some good things about the demos as people seemed to take away the right message, but I think they could have been much much better. I felt the demos were to focused on features versus the benefits of the features. To make an effective demonstration people need to associate with what you're showing, this can be done in a number of ways, tie it together with a story that people could place themselves into and when talking about features be sure to explain how this is going to impact the person watching, how this is going to make their life better. So with that information I think the demos needed a connecting string between them, all this stuff is supposed to work together now so why not tie all the demos together. They felt disjointed without a tied in story. the SAP demo was kind of flat, and I felt like I only saw half of it (also it wasn't that great, the stuff that was shown could be done years ago with the SAP LSX in Notes, so not really sure the big deal), but the problem with the demo was that we had to take the word for the data coming from SAP and being pushed back to SAP, I wanted to see SAP to see it was real. There was a humongous screen there, one side could have easily shown the SAP table and the other with the live data entry. The Sametime demo was probably the best out of all of them, when it talked about features it applied them to things you do day to day, or the pains that it solves over the current version.

Who remembers the bit in the middle about WBSE? (Workplace for mad cows?) There were a few things in the opening that probably didn't excite most people and gave them a glazed over feeling, I'm not sure what percentage of audience are Domino Admins/Developers but I bet WBSE is much more suited for a C level briefing.

So to summarize, overall it wasn't bad, it was good, but not fantasitc. I think it could have been much better. Good on Andrew for having the gonads to write it as he saw it.