IBM Verse

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

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.

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.

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.

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