Unless you were on vacation in Tahiti with no BlackBerry or laptop, then you should know by now about the IBM-Microsoft Bake-Off that took place last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. According to the press, analysts, and attendees, IBM clearly won and came out ahead! The best part, in my opinion, when was Microsoft said that our product was better than theirs!
Anyway, yesterday, I picked up a blog posting from Mike Gotta. He was the person who planned and moderated the session between IBM and Microsoft. In it, he provides some great background information as to how the session was planned and organized.
I particularly like the post because it helps me, a non-attendee, really understand what happened last week. How can Microsoft mess up so badly? Was it just that their speakers were bad? Or was it that their product was really not up-to-par? After reading Mike's blog post, I can now answer those questions very easily: Microsoft's product is really no way near what Lotus Connections provides!
Mike says that the session has been in the works since January of this year. That's right, the speakers had 6 months to prepare! The session outline was clearly given to them and they knew exactly what to expect during the bake-off. So was the Microsoft disaster due to lack of preparation? Nope!
Here's my favorite quote from Mike's blog entry:
IBM was the clear winner across the board. The storyline and narrative woven around the presentation and demonstrations was near-perfect. The IBM team established the use case scenarios and drilled down into those scenarios in a way that allowed people to make the connection (no pun intended) between the use cases and functional components.
I strongly encourage you all to read it!