IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks).
Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years, but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts.
To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 days, so I'm actually quite satisfied with the migration.
Migration from Lotus Notes is always horrible. In 2011 I worked on many migrations to Google Apps for Business (GSuite, Google for Work etc) and there was only one person in all of Google who understood Lotus Notes and could maintain the migration tool he had created.
And every time a big user moves away from Lotus Notes (and other such dinosaurs, such as Cobol), it gets harder as this knowledge becomes more niche. The people doing it spend the rest of their career at that combany and that's it.
What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues.
I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.
Ex-IBMer here. I used to work for what was then called IBM Software Group in the early 2000s. I worked with some brilliant engineers, some of whom had spent their entire careers at IBM and achieved some amazing things. I worked with some brilliant managers as well. But the place felt rotten to the core.
I don't think there was a problem with the people so much as with the system. IBM, as you might expect for a company of that size and age, felt incredibly bureaucratic. Whatever you wanted to achieve, there was a process that made it hard to achieve it. Whatever good idea you had, there was a committee of people who would dilute and ruin that idea or simply forbid you from pursuing it. Whatever industry standard tool you wanted to use, you couldn't use it because there were IBM tools that you were required to use instead, tools that slowed you down and frustrated you (I'm thinking of stuff with Lotus or Rational in the name). Whenever you needed to make a decision, it felt like no one was empowered to use their initiative to make that decision. Frankly, it felt like doing good work meant having to go under the radar because IBM wasn't set up to allow you to do good work.
I did have good times there and I hear good things about the way that IBM has dragged itself into the 21st century since I left but I regret having spent so many of the best years of my career at that company.
I was at IBM research (as an engineer), and thankfully I can say most of my direct colleagues were great and highly competent
...when it came to actual research. I think we had a good engineering core team too, but whenever we had to interact with "big IBM" (outside research) we mostly bumped into incompetent people, and career(money)-focused managers.
Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years.
Since then I had to work with other IBMers (both engineers and managers/team leads) on different projects and although some of them I'd consider knowledgeable, none of the engineers were able to create high quality output.
But I guess this is the same in any monstrously huge organizations.
I would have been surprised if IBM could tackle such a complicated engineering problem like this migration.
> Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years.
Not fun, but I get the idea. That is never a good situation. I has been a manager in the past, and I have seen many people that despises the position. I think that it is more important that people gives credit for, and that everybody seems to call out bad management but few appreciate good management because is "transparent" and it seems that everything will work without them.
FWIW, my direct manager was indeed "transparent", as in, he wasn't managing us textbook-properly, but he definitely shielded us from upper management BS, while helping us out to achieve our goals and enable our engineering work.
I usually try to avoid assessing management as "bad" (it's just a downward spiral, everyone just says it, and trigger each other), but in this particular case it was so exceptionally bad that we all went into long discussions and analysis of it.
IBM is huge... It's not really a single company, but like a bunch of independently operating companies that share (some) resources, and of course their name.
We have fairly high hiring standards in our office, but when it comes to interacting with people from other offices, I've worked with people I'd never hire. I work on the IBM Cloud platform, which seems to be one of the most innovative places at IBM currently (compared to GBS/GTS, the latter became Kyndryl recently).
I heard similar things about Ericsson, here in Sweden.
> I work on the IBM Cloud platform, which seems to be one of the most innovative places at IBM currently
That makes sense, it is a newer technology. I think that as an engineering discipline we are quite bad at maintaining our systems. "old" systems become hard to work with and people just gives up. It should not be like that.
> These guys were important once, right? I don't think I'm old enough to remember such a time. I thought they were a law firm for a while because they only seemed to be mentioned in court cases.
Its funny how differently people probably perceive them based on what tech they work with. At work, I use their IBM i / AS400 on the daily. At school, I work with IBM Q for research. I would contend that IBM is one of the most important players in QC / NISQ today, and still notable for their mainframes and things like zOS. And what about RHEL?
According to their Q4-FY2020 earnings report, they did $2.5bn in revenue from their systems segment last year (which includes IBM Z, Power, and OS's). But their most important segments are Global Technology Services ($6.6bn revenue) and "Cloud & Cognitive Software Segment" ($6.8bn revenue). GTS is cloud infrastructure + support, while C&CSS includes "Cloud & Data Platforms", "Cognitive Applications", and transactions processing platforms...
I'm not sure what exposure the commenter has had to IBM, but it's a bit of a culture shock to hear someone saying they're not important.
I’m 41, and know all those things, and my father’s company ran for most of my life on AS/400. But they replaced those systems over a decade ago. My whole professional career IBM has been trying to commit corporate suicide in a stumbling awkward way. It’s a testament to how long you can keep spending down brand credibility. I struggle to call them important today. Maybe historically interesting. But not important.
Because they're only predictive of what's worked in the past, and works okay enough to ride the entropy in the present — not what will progress really well in the future.
IBM was the Google or Microsoft of the 80s. Like HP, in realigning the company to survive they destroyed what made them great. I worked with many smart IBM folks… without exception they were laid off or driven out to meet some random metric.
The Red Hat acquisition and spin out of the services garbage might make them more relevant again.
IBM was the entire IT industry of 1950s, 1960s, and most of 1970s. It is hard to explain IBM's dominance in today's terms. IBM used to be so dominant that the entire financial industry could not operate without their IBM mainframes and today major banks still run on IBM.
The downside (to IBM) was that Wall Street decided "never again" and fought hard to prevent another company of IBM's scale from reappearing.
Anyone who makes such a comment is ignorant. IBM has far more access to the highest levels of the biggest companies and governments than just about any other IT company. Just because they’re not hosting free email doesn’t mean they are irrelevant.
Yes, that is such a complete misunderstanding on what IBM does that it hurts. IBM is a huge corporation close to be 100 years old that still is one one of the most innovatives in the world.
"In 2020, IBM topped the list of patent recipients for the 28th consecutive year with 9,130 patents, while Samsung Electronics Co. was second with 6,415. IBM received the most patents in three of the 10 fastest growing fields in technology -- quantum computers, machine learning and computer systems using neural networks that imitate how the human brain works, according to a recent study by Fairview Research’s IFI Claims Patent Services." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-12/ibm-s-pat...
Google Gross revenue: $161.85 billion. IBM Gross revenue: $73.62 billion. Twitter revenue: $3.72 billion
IBM does not dominate the cultural landscape like Google or Facebook do. But, it is a robust company that has stand the test of time.
It would be like laughing at Akamai or Incapsula because nobody talks about them on the general media.
It doesn't get better if you go further back. IBM has the same revenue now that it did in 1996.
Robust usually means strong and vigorous. I think it would be a challenge to find someone who believes the past decade at IBM has been that, particularly the Rometty era (IE 22 consecutive quarters of revenue decline)
"Minutes after this article was published, an IBM spokesperson dictated the company’s statement over the phone, presumably because email is a bit spotty"
Condolences to the team. I don't have a particularly strong opinion on IBM, but I am getting a chuckle out of all of waves hands around this.
Relevant AMA from IBM developers which some questions didn't go as well as they expected:
> What is the worst piece of software you've worked on and why is it Lotus Notes?
> Why does Lotus Notes always crash? And why does IBM package Lotus Notes with utilities to terminate and clean up Lotus Notes, instead of just fixing Lotus Notes in the first place?
> "Why is Lotus Notes still a thing? Seriously though, as someone who works for your "competition" in that field the product just seems like an embarrassment." to which they replied: "Actually... I rarely use Lotus Notes... I've been using Verse. All my email is in my browser now! - Richard."
It would be interesting to hear the theory of what happened between developing the interesting engine tech under the hood, suitable for flexible collaboration and active databases, and end user riots. Was it that marketing had to decide between promoting the bundled mail/calendar apps and promoting it as a custom app platform, and latter withered away?
"We're told that the migration plan followed from IBM's decision in 2018 to sell various software products, including Notes, to India-based HCL Technologies. Following the sale, Big Blue didn't want its data on HCL's servers."
AS an ex-IBMer, I can tell you that there are hundreds of thousands who are directly affected but most of them would be frustrated but not overly concerned. Like in a government, they will end up making a scapegoat out of a few minions but the leadership will remain unscathed. It’s an organisation where everyone is responsible but none would be Accountable.
Christ, pay me $10M and I'll bring an army of 30 geeks to turnaround this landfill fire. I did a startup that M&A'ed organization email providers of all sorts (Exchange, postfix, sendmail, etc.) to aggregate them for efficiencies at scale.
I wouldn't let excellent internal IT to do a massive, specialized, critical migration because of the finger-pointing risks and pressure to fire should there be an unforeseen, unmitigated problem. When something is as mission-critical as email, use a lifeline and phone a consultant who does this regularly.
IBM should use this crisis as an opportunity to fire horrible IT resources, e.g., managers and staff.
I worked at a large European tech company (~10k employees) that was a big user of Notes, Sametime, Domino, etc. While we left a few workflows in Notes, the overall transition to Outlook for email and scheduling was largely painless for the end user. I hope IBM recovers soon. I wouldn't wish this level of corporate hell on my worst enemy.
Rather, I would not buy a software product from them or accept any project that depended on one since they eventually will sell it to some smaller company to dump it, apparently even when they still need it themselves.
They have their mainframes, too. Not a big market, but highly lucrative, AFAIK. I read something about the mainframe division contributing 10% of their revenue but 25% of their profits.
It's kind of strange, though, they're not doing better in that department. I remember they launched a cloud-like offering around 2005, hosting customers' applications in multiple globally distributed data centers, with full redundancy, load balancing, etc. I suppose the world wasn't ready for that back then.
Does this affect the part of IBM that used to be Red Hat? When I was at RH as recently as 2017, email was an absolutely essential part of most workflows. It was all pretty crappy and last-century - don't even get me started on bugzilla being similarly essential - but it did work.
Former Red Hatter wondering the same thing. RH was transitioning to Gmail right as I was onboarding. I never really used the previous system which I think was Zimbra iirc.
Big IT company which specializes in yada yada here. We did years ago our own migration away from Notes (>100k accounts), and also for customers. Painful? Probably. But it can be done.
My workplace did a migration from inhouse Exchange to cloud-housted Outlook and it was pretty smooth, but you'd expect that since it's one Microsoft product to another and probably a migration that MS has helped facilitate thousands of times.
It's very unclear. As someone in tech that's the first thing I wanted to know. There was mention of their version of Notes being EOL. Maybe just upgrading to a new version of Notes?
The actual transition is said to be from servers they sold to servers they still own. But they have at least three email systems, apparently (Outlook, Notes, and something called Verse are all mentioned), and I wonder if this is part of the issue. Three email systems could be worse than any one of them?
Wouldn't a sane approach be to settle on one system first? Or to upgrade one of these to the target one? Migrating all of them at the same time sounds incredibly complicated, with no fallback option if something goes wrong.
Anything involving Notes seems like a dumpster fire. It was so bad at a former employer of mine that people actually left the company because of it. We used it for email and scheduling (or tried to).
IBM offered Exchange as a choice at least 3 years ago but most people just don’t want to change. More than half of my colleagues are still using Notes Client just for Email, which is strange enough because Notes is too freaking heavy for just doing emails.
I’ve migrated to Exchange when it’s still under pilot. But the offer is not available now, I guess the reason is that too few employees choose this option.
Sometimes it’s not really about tech. IBM has decent technology, even in Cloud field, but it’s hard to pivot for a company in this size.
How will we all access the torrents of corporate spam?!
A good while ago, I may or may not have heard from someone who had registered a domain name like "foo.bar"... a placeholder sort of name, a valid domain. Got the impression that lots of IBMer email was mostly about golf.
In many orgs three days of no email would be a serious show stopper. I dare say that if I was CTO of a company that relies on email (which is pretty much the majority of companies) I would be wary of choosing IBM for anything critical from now on.
If they were running your systems for you, how many days would it take for you to say something in a public fashion (a tweet, for example)? Give them a week, maybe?
IBM has a major Slack outage at least once a week for most of this year. I don't know really whether it's a Slack problem, or an IBM problem, or if trying to split off Kyndryl at the same time is just too much, but it's always having rolling outages.
I am an ibmer and dont see a slack outtage every week
let's get back to work and do well for our company
instead of speculating, sharing anecdotes. Hey, you have IBM stock, probably. Do you want it to be worth anything?
To any IBMers commenting - why would you shoot your own company in the foot? Yes people are suffering and trying to get by. Yes there are great and not so great people, in any company. It's a big migration and someone f*ed up. Do you really want to hurt stock prices, and the company by blowing off steam about it? Get back to work!!!!
Is this the same as (or based upon) the old Lotus Notes?
Had that at a company where I worked in the 1990s. It was kind of new/novel and interesting then. We used it mainly as a knowledge base and for internal forums on various subjects. IIRC required an OS/2 server to run, which was the only OS/2 box in the company.
I had the same experience right out of university. After about 18 months the company transitioned to Office 365 and everything got better. It took forever to finally get rid of Notes because so many internal tools had been developed as notes apps and so they all had to be rebuilt.
Ha! I saw a very big multinational F500 company completely reorganize its AD, because users were unable to login to Office 365 with their standard accounts user@<location>.company.com. After weeks of complete disasters the company decided to switch to user@company.com just for O365.
Same thing happened at one of the largest employers in the state. They have several entities all with different domains. Now everyone's login is different from their email domain. Even though no matter which domain you use in the To: field, It will still be routed properly.
That makes more sense anyway. Why should your individual identity be hardwired to your current location or department? If you changed jobs within the company you had to get a new email address and login?
Why should your individual identity be hardwired to your current location or department?
When you have a workforce the size of IBM it makes sense.
At my last company, with about 300 workers, we had three people with the same first name and last name. Two had the same middle initials.
At my current company, pre-pandemic, even though my department was only 50 people, we still had two with the same first, middle, and last names. They ended up being "1" and "2" in their e-mail addresses.
If your company has a large number of first, second, or third-generation immigrants from Central or South America in it, you run into name collisions all the time.
A company I worked for did that. Not really for geo-location reasons, but brand ones. People that worked for foobar got a @foobar address, and barfoo people got @barfoo. It was all owned by the same company, but the companies that got bought up kept their brands alive, and this was part of it.
I bounced around divisions, so I kept getting new logins. The old emails would forward to the new ones, but the logins would be sunsetted out as I no longer needed access to old projects. I actually don't know how the backend works, other than every time I need some permissions or something fixed, invariable the IT people get very confused by the mess, whatever it is.
My guess would be that's just their login, but their email would not have their location sub-domain (I've never seen a sub-domain in e-mail, well actually not true, people with domain + country TLDs all have it, e.g. clarkson@bbc.co.uk).
Of course moving locations/departments would mean getting a new login which is all sorts of problematic.
There’s no reason to do that, though. You can set your MX record to whatever you want for your domain. Why would you set yourself up to have to change your email? Not to mention advertising that your email is on a raspberry pi. Somebody will probably come along and DDOS that thing just for fun.
The problem is when Microsoft employees are only able to consult, don't have access to any systems, no one internally seems to own the migration process (or at least appears competent at communicating anything) and even worse, the majority of it appears to be outsourced to a third party in India. Hypothetically of course, no large enterprise would ever do such a thing ;)
> Should’ve just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365. Leave the technology work to tech companies.
It's not as straight forward as that,
Notes can be used as a really good (if designed properly) work flow application that has (or had) much more functionallty than Outlook. Email is only a part of Notes
Not sure if you’re sarcastic or not, but my company (enterprise size) has migrated from self hosted Exchange + network file shares + GitLab + Jenkins + Artifactory + 1000 other things to Office 365 + Azure and it’s been great.
Probably took a lot more effort than what I notice as an end user…but I do get the impression that Microsoft is pretty good in enterprise productivity…
That's where I am too. We've been moving to 365 over the past year, and during the pandemic I finally cut the cord to the old technology (corporate IMAP/SMTP which I then glue up with clients myself).
And... sorry everyone, but BY FAR the best, cleanest, most performant and reliable work-provided email/messaging/calendaring solution I've had during my almost 2.5 decades of being a full time Linux user is... Microsoft Office 365. And frankly the competition isn't even close.
I don't love everything about it. But... OMG, it works. It just works in my browser and I don't need to do anything to get all the features that IT departments for decades were only able to make work on their own blessed windows images.
You can now self-fire yourself. Or could be easily "reduced". Congratz mate. Or maybe you are in manager position ?
O, and just wait till global MS365 outage. Or global MS365 emails leak. Or passwords leak or just sell offers on black market...
Also all that thread conflate email systems with "email/messaging/calendaring" packages - that always was corporational level stuff so no serious attempts from open software world.
And maybe you remember Netscape ~4.x had profiles in LDAP ? But, somehow, that fake opensource fundation Mozilla removed it. Why ? Obviously - to trim down competition for budies ! And here we are - "I'm so happy with app via browser!"...
Office365 as a platform appears to suffer from terrible unreliability. My last role was in a google apps shop, and i miss it every single day. (it's been 3 years).
Just an anecdote but my experience has been diametrically opposite to yours. My last role was in an office 365 shop and I miss it every single day. Most of the pain in Google-land comes from meet/chat and everything being in the browser.
My organisation has used 365 for the last two or so years (after migration from Google) and I can't say I've noticed much difference in reliability between the two. Google has their bad days as well. What in particular have you noticed?
Not sure why I have the opposite experience. We transitioned from self hosted Exchange to Office 365 and then Teams a few years ago, and I don't even remember a single instance of an outage.
My experience was that MS understands how IT departments work (from small to large) and are fantastic at providing resources to customers if it means you'll end up using more MS products. At a prior job they paid for a local consulting group to configure the Office 365 tenant, connect it with the existing on-prem infrastructure and train the staff on migrating mailboxes.
Same story. We have some weird behavior with Microsoft services but rarely and don't suffer from lack of resources and instability due to inflexible self hosted infrastructure.
At my previous company I administered a Microsoft 365 setup shortly after they switched over from an on premises AD setup with mixed results.
One bug which stuck out was trying to sync sharepoint directories with a length of over 255 characters locally on a windows machine with onedrive.
In Sharepoint you could create such directories and put files in them no problem through the webapp, but try to open a spreadsheet from the directory within windows file explorer and it would fail to open due to windows 255 character path limit.
IBM is a consulting company. Only IBM Research and their mainframe division do anything interesting in tech. And their research division seems to be mainly there for marketing/image purposes (helping consultants sell overpriced “solutions” to clueless top management).
It's my understanding that they are largely a consultancy now, helping their clients move things onto their cloud products. I imagine there is quite a bit of vendor lock-in. Seeing as the need for cloud migration is ever-growing in every single industry, I don't see IBM becoming totally irrelevant any time soon. But they are definitely past "Day 1".
They are far more of a services and support company than a tech company these days. Their current tech is mostly used by their services teams to implement solutions.
As I've said before in comments here on HN and Twitter, there is no real definition of a "tech company" or "tech industry", the word "tech" defines the operating model. This is the dirty little secret VCs don't like to tell you because it means they can call Tesla a tech company (its a car and battery manufacturer) to fetch tech-like valuations or Facebook a tech company (its a media company). Tech operating models typically net high gross margins (i.e. Facebook) which is one of its major defining characteristics.
I therefore posit there is no such thing as a "tech industry", but rather businesses that sit on a spectrum of operating models from:
- Back office IT supported
- Tech enabled
- Tech Led
Personally I would define IBM as a Diversified IT, IT Services and Software company that is has an operating model that sits somewhere between tech enabled and tech led.
It's not quite as good as the native app on Windows/macOS. I definitely prefer the latter so I would be quite disappointed. About the only app that offers a equivalent experience between web and app versions is Teams (seeing as it's just a JS app running more or less the same code as the web version so it performs just as poorly in the web browser as in the app). All the other apps like Outlook etc have what I call 'lite web apps' with a fraction of the functionality and performance of the proper app itself.
I use Teams on a Mac. Every day or two the chat window randomly disappears and it stops displaying notifications. If I don't notice I sometimes go more than a day before I realize that it's dead and restart Teams to fix the problem.
Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years, but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts.
To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 days, so I'm actually quite satisfied with the migration.