The State of IBM
I started reading Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? by Louis Gerstner last night. Apparently its accuracy is questionable but I think it's going to make an interesting read anyway. If not only for the anecdotes. Like the one about the day Louis had meetings with Bill Gates and the then head of Lotus. Apparently Bill was given the name-tag of the Lotus head and he wasn't a happy man.
In many ways you can tell a lot about a company simply from the state of its website. Imagine a small company with one office, one product and a handful of staff. Much like their business their site will be simple and easy to understand. Take a huge company like IBM with offices, departments and structural hierarchies covering the whole globe and you can imagine what their website will be like. From first-hand experience I find the IBM site almost impossible to use and their actual service appalling.
Imagine then that the task facing Louis Gerstner as he joined IBM is similar to one of us lot being in charge of making their website the most user-friendly in the world. Respect to Louis...
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Totally off topic - but it's a rant and this entry is dated Tuesday. ;)
Just added a role to a database. Typed the square brackets. Of course, this is the one place where the square brackets are NOT required!
Ranted in the office. Felt a bit better. Added it here. Feel even better.
Thanks for the Tuesday rants Jake. They work on Thursdays too.
Don't worry about it Kathy. Always here as a shoulder to cry on...
I fully agree with your website and company/organisation assessment. IBM's is certainly a disaster. Does anyone know anybody who accesses the new Notes.net website with the new URL? How do they want to gain new visitors with http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd? I hope they won't forget to renew notes.net and will always point it to the right place.
As IBM business partner we once wanted to offer a complete hardware & finance package to a 20 employee company. It took me days to speak to a knowledgable person. This guy then searched another expert within IBM and couldn't find anything with IBMs tools, so while speaking to me over the phone he used the web & Google. I said thanks, "already did that myself and found you".