IBM just announced a new appliance. You can see the whole thing here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/11/lotus_server_appliance/

"Late yesterday, IBM's Lotus collaboration software unit, one of the
key pillars in the company's Software Group, lifted the veil a bit on
its next-generation of Lotus Foundations Start appliances, which are
set to ship in December."

"Caleb Barlow, senior product manager for the Lotus Foundations
appliance, isn't keen on giving away a lot of the details about what
comprises the guts of the machine, but he says that the box is based
on an x64 architecture and that it runs a very lean implementation of
Linux based on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Sever 10."

Ok so far. But lets see what's bundled on the appliance....

"...Barlow says that IBM and the Nitix experts it acquired did a lot
of engineering work with SLES to streamline it and integrate the
components that are used in the appliance, which includes a virtual
private network, a firewall, a MySQL database server, a Web server
(which one, IBM is not saying), and a print and file server. The mail
server is Domino, and it is not stored inside that 100 MB DOM, but
rather on the disk drives inside the appliance."

Now before Serge gets his panties in a bind, yes, this is a Lotus
product launch.
Really its a collaboration between Lotus and IBM hardware.

So here's the interesting question. What's wrong with this picture?
I'd ask Ferris Buller, but like IBM SWG's senior management, he's out
to lunch.

Lets face it. Ambush isn't in sync with his counterparts. Now I'm not
saying that they should have included IDS in the bundle, but they
could have included SE or heck DB2 Express.  MySQL was probably chosen
because the appliance team still thinks in terms of LAMP.

So one has to ask... since IBM is now shipping MySQL as part of the
appliance... are they paying licensing fees to Sun? ;-)

Clearly someone at IBM IM's top executive team is sleeping at the
switch or someone needs to yank Sam's chain about the glass walls
between the different divisions of SWG.  Maybe Ambuj should put a call
in to Alan G. for some help with cross pillar communication?

TANSTAAFL!

But hey! What do I know?

-G

Your points lately have been very good.

I think you are right on the money with regard to Ambush not having a
clue as to what to do compared with his peers.

But keep in mind IBM does not have much brainpower put into creative
initiatives that are not directly related to offshoring and outsourcing
their own as well as other companies.  If it's not about relocating the
whole goddam company to India it probably isn't going to get attention.
IBM has more expertise in outsourcing and offshoring than they do in
computers anymore.

This I believe is consistent with Ambush being an Indian, totally unaware
of the American market or any other market besides India.  He's just camping
out with IDS until he gets his golden parachute to Bangalore.

My prayer is that IBM will soon collapse under its own weight, finally, like
the finance world, running out of victims and closing its doors in shame and
embarrassment for all the grief it has put its own employees and customers
through.

Eventually as outsourcing and offshoring plays out, somebody with a spark
of intelligence inside IBM will do the right things.  But most likely not
in our lifetime.

-ID-