IBM Verse | Hacker News Reader

IBM Verse

ibm.com

94 pointsamzpix30 comments

This is such a confusing product page. One of the email examples halfway down the page actually has Lorem Ipsum in it.

The first demo video, showing a "Client Meeting" at 10am, doesn't make any sense from a design perspective - a user taps on the meeting, only to receive a modal dialog that has no more information than what was already on screen. Worse yet, the "Options" button opens a nested modal with more options, on which the demo user taps "OK."

If IBM is trying to show their aptitude for designing frustrating user interfaces, they're doing a good job.

If IBM is trying to show their aptitude for designing frustrating user interfaces

This is basically the latest version of Lotus Notes. The UI might not be great, but anything is an improvement over the old versions.

I'm pretty sure they'll be able to sell it because of credibility anyway so it's worth a shot for them aye.

Who exactly does IBM still have credibility with? I don't know about the rest of the world but here in Australia they're an absolute laughing stock. They're the company you call to mind when you want an example of laughably bad, Dilbertesque corporate behaviour.

Six, seven years ago my circle of friends had all heard rumours about how bad it was. None of us believed it; then one of the circle got a gig at IBM and the report back was "it's worse than you've heard". Still - even with intel from a trusted source - the rest of us said no, it can not be.

Then another one got a gig. "It's worse than the first one said", said he. And again, the rest said, no, this is impossible.

Then it was my turn. And I swear to you it was worse than the guy who said it was worse than the guy who said it was bad was. Or whatever that sentence is meant to look like, I don't know.

Perhaps if you buy mainframes or Watsons from IBM they're half-decent, but for professional services I have never seen anything like it in my life. Woefully poor.

After looking at the IBM info, I've put some thoughts into what this product is about from two perspectives: #1 technology and #2 comparison to older products (Lotus Notes, MS Outlook, etc)

Perspective #1: the tech. Sometimes a new product is driven by progress in technological gadgetry. In this case, I believe that gadgetry is the "analytics". The new algorithms (NLP natural language processing, semantics engine, etc) has a lot of overlap with the IBM Watson engine that beat humans at Jeopardy. Take this data analysis engine out of the R&D lab (Watson) and and apply it to email inboxes. Also leverage the engine in user queries searching for lost emails (possibly using English sentences instead of boolean logic). Presumably, IBM is enthusiastic enough about this analytics "secret sauce" that they'd rather not just add it to a stale brandname such as "Lotus Notes" which results in easily ignored press releases of "Lotus Notes v12" or "Lotus Notes NextGen". Therefore, you get a new product called "IBM Verse". There are other technologies such as integrating chat/social/cloud more tightly into the main screen but I believe it's the mostly the analytics that IBM thinks is the key differentiator. Others have already integrated mail+chat+social+sharing so in this area, IBM is catching up instead of breaking new ground.

Perspective #2: Comparison to old products -- the older well-known email clients such as Lotus Notes, Micrsoft Outlook were built before the prioritization of mobile devices, cloud infrastructure, and social such as Facebook. Task switching with Lotus Notes + Sametime Chat or MS Outlook + MSN Messenger + Sharepoint is the "old inefficient way". The old products also acted pretty much as "dumb pipes" or "dumb storage containers" of email text. The only "intelligence" in those enteprise email products was filtering for spam. I guess IBM is betting on a new email product that analyzes text in a deeper sense than just "spam keywords" and also gathering statistics on user behavior with clicking certain types of emails, certain senders, etc. The proposition is that it will dramatically reduce the cognitive workload in managing an overloaded inbox.

What's not clear is if IBM Verse requires an IBM datacenter to be in the loop (for cloud sync, sharing, etc), or if it can be deployed as a private cloud solution.

I think it could be one of the IBM Bluemix services in future. It is very likely that most of the IBM SaaS services will be hosted in there.

So what... what is it?

I've just spent five minutes clicking around the web site and I still haven't got the foggiest idea.

Looks like a managed enterprisey version of Google Inbox/Mailbox app/Evomail. Probably does some natural language processing and keeps track of appointments, due dates, action items, etc.

But still no clue if this is a web based application or a desktop ( aka Windows ) version?

It does look like it may have a mobile companion,either on smartphones or tablets, but other than this, is really low in details.

Don't worry, if it's desktop it'll be a Java app and therefore cross-platform! Yay!

Wait, what?

So what... what is it?

Broadly speaking probably an evolution of lotus notes. Or rather its email functionality.

Seems like a more social network approach to Lotus notes, but they're not really showing the product so who knows?

It isn't clear from that page, but this is actually the latest version of IBM Domino, i.e. the server for Lotus Notes.

IBM still have a large number of corporate customers on Notes/Domino and they've been talking for a while about how to integrate email with other "social" apps for file sharing etc.

This is obviously server-based and so means e-mail without the Notes client, but I believe that it's still built on a Domino server underneath.

My requirements for email are really simple.. NLP and analytics will probably just annoy me.

For example, when a calender invite arrives it should show up on my calender (and give 10 minute warnings, etc.) even if I did not accept it. Why? Notes makes me feel like an idiot when I miss a meeting just because I didn't look at the email.

Another: search should be instant, reliable and clear. In Notes, regular search doesn't cover the domain name.

Suppose I want to send mail to everyone on a calender invite. To do this I have to cut and paste the names from several fields and then delete my own name from the list.

They should address every single issue on http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/ before worrying about analytics.

There is a "call to action" but nothing to let me know why I might want to act (a brighter space? me to we? I don't know what those mean).

At least with Google's Inbox there is enough actual information for me to evaluate, consider, and eventually arrive at a considered "no, thank you".

With Verse, well, I don't know why I've even devoted the cycles it took to write this, let alone why I would evaluate Verse.

Maybe next time.

Bold claim: if you're on HN, you're not IBM's target demographic

Definitely, but that doesn't mean the messaging shouldn't make sense.

It seems they're hitting on the problem that Email and Calendars are too stupid, cluttered, and have contacts all over the place.

If you're the type of person who agrees with that problem, what do you think you're going to do when faced with the idea of learning an entirely new product like this?

Intriguing point.

Pretty confusing.

My guess/hope...

This is aiming to be GMail + Google Now for the enterprise. Something that will parse your mail, schedule and contacts to generate suggestions or reminders and create an easily accessible "context" for each.

A workplace client that can generate 'cards', reminders and contextualize common bits of information (Think UPS tracking numbers in GMail - applied to support tickets, physical sites, projects, POs and budgets in an enterprise) with the creepy accuracy of Google Now would actually be interesting - yet another take on unified communications or a skin deep re-imagining of email would not.

1. I'm having flashbacks to Google (Apache) Wave. That is not a good thing.

2. How much would it cost to have a professional voice over artist record that spiel? Less than $500 right? That has to be better than the product manager using his laptop's microphone for the official YouTube video (or whatever it actually was.)

3. "Every decision in the design process was made with the user in mind." Way to meet the base-line requirement for user design: "Consider the fact that there is a user."

I pity the poor souls who will have to dogfood this potential monstrosity within IBM.

you clearly haven't worked with notes. ;)

I am an IBMer (no affiliation with this product) and am actually excited to give this a try.

Looks less terrible than Notes. So it has that going for it.

From the people who brought you Lotus Notes.

I think the point of IBM Design is that it's not the same people.

Oh, yay, another reinvention of e-mail.

I'm so excited ... not.

Maybe if they finally would be able to implement 30 year technology correctly or being really innovative and dump all the crud that accumulated over the years instead then I could maybe hope a little.

OTOH, it's from IBM. They know how to do e-mail. They have Lotus Notes.

The lotus notes thing was like kicking a dead dog. <sarcasm> No need for it... </sarcasm>

Laugh at Notes/Domino all you want. It was ahead of its time. If it had a pretty GUI it would have played out differently.

One of the things I was only belatedly appreciative about Lotus notes was the experience on Linux. While I was at IBM, I used Lotus notes on Windows, then on Linux. The Linux version did occasionally crash; but overall the experience was similar to a Windows user.

The next company I worked at used Exchange, and developers could use Outlook webmail or an IMAP client like Thunderbird. I found this experience to be substandard; both from a perspective of consistency with managers who had Outlook and found calendaring to be pretty awful compared to Lotus notes.

This might be less important now that you can have your Calendar integrated into your smart phone, but I did not have a smart phone at the time.

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