IBM-Microsoft Hiring Tit-For-Tat
Some accounts made it sound like these hiresmost recently Julio Estrada and Bob Congdon, along with earlier recruits ( Gary Devendorf, Barry Briggs, and others) were poached directly from the IBM/Lotus payroll.
Such is not the case (well except for Congdon, who most recently worked on Workplace Designer and left IBM directly for Redmond.) Cliff Reeves, whose move to Microsoft was news broken by CRN too many years ago to count, had also already left Big Blue before Microsoft snarfed him up.
And Briggs, for example, did CTO stints at Interleaf and Broadvision between IBM/Lotus and Microsoft, for example.
Okay. Just to set the record straight, CRN's story didn't make such direct-poaching claims. (After all, if folks want to work someplace cool, don't they just go to Google now?)
Brill also makes the case that Bob Balaban and Rocky Oliver two consultants, have returned to IBM and wonders where the story on their return is. Good question. Nobody told me about Balaban and Oliver. So don't be a stranger Ed, et. al. Also, as long-time Lotus watchers some of us are familiar with the fabulous Estrada brothers and their contributions, making them something like household names. BTW, isn't Miguel still at IBM?
As another aside, is this the same Bob Balaban, the actor/director/writer renaissance men who's starred in everything from Seinfeld to Gosford Park to A Mighty Wind?? Guess not.
But back to Estrada and Congdon. The two collaboration hotshots now on the Exchange Server team. That product has had a contortionist history, starting out as a Microsoft-touted Notes-Killer that would combine mail with collaboration development talents. The latter effort failed, and collaboration perks flowed over to SharePoint, much to the consternation of third-party developers Microsoft had corralled for Exchange.
The addition of Estrada and Congdon to the Exchange team begs the question of whether the pendulum is swinging back to Exchange-based collaboration.
One e-mail VAR says adding collaboration features and related development tools to Exchange makes sense. It would help Microsoft "distance itself from scalable Linux-based Exchange emulators like Scalix and Apptran and to target Domino shops in head-to-head competition with Lotus workplace," writes Ron Herardian, system architect with Global System Services, Mountain View, Calif.
Microsoft, Herardian says, cannot counter IBM's long-term strategy leading away from monolithic fat clients like Notes to centrally-managed clients running on the Eclipse framework. The whole Eclipse thing, he adds, provides a cross-platform Java-based client framework that can be centrally controlled....So a Notes client plug in on Linux desktops provides a seamless user experience regardless of the operating system.
A longtime Exchange partner begs to differ: "I don't see Exchange going back to collaboration. Microsoft can't be that stupid," he quipped.
LESS STEALTHY LIQUID SYSTEMS
Sometimes it's true: Ask and ye shall receive. The secretive Liquid Systems new home to former BEA heavy-weight Scott Dietzen, did spill some beans about its collaboration software plans. Word had it they were working on an open source Exchange clone. Today, surfing around to their web site, voila there's a place to sign up for the new Zimbra collaboration suite. For those dying for more deats, said suite is "coming soon."
Oh. And there are screen shots.