Thursday, September 09, 2010

Big Blue’s Lotus sandbox blues? Give us back our biscuits!

Add to the list of unfathomable corporate decisions IBM’s recent making unavailable the much-loved Lotus Sandbox archive, see here, please go read it.

I do refer to the Sandbox several times per year but haven’t visited for a month or two, and was only alerted to this sad action by Thierry Cayla’s R.I.P posting and I agree with him that it’s not one of IBM’s smartest moves.

So I sent of the following via the developerWorks feedback link on the Sandbox page and maybe you’ll consider doing so too if you’d like to see the Sandbox archive revived.

Here’s my developerWorks feedback to IBM (why not have a go yourself?) …

Bring back the Lotus Sandbox. There were still valuable downloads on it that aren't available elsewhere (such as OpenNTF.org). Consequently  decommissioning the Sandbox will prove to be a disservice to the Lotus Notes/Domino community. Even if you don't actively maintain but merely leave it there as a "legacy" resource, it will remain of value to the Notes community. Could you not afford the trivial expense of leaving it there? Surely your budget is not so constrained that you can't afford the disk space and download bandwidth?
- - - - - - - - - - -

With the boilerplate response: Thank you for giving developerWorks your feedback. Your comments give developerWorks important information that we will use to further improve our design.

Time will tell if they do anything positive about this unimpressive decision.

This reminds me a bit of IBM Australia’s decision, back around  1989 or 1990 -- when admittedly the economy was getting a bit tough, and the usual aggressive annual sales growth targets were being missed -- to stop supplying free biscuits (cookies, if you prefer) in the IBM coffee rooms across the nation. Rumour had it that the biscuits were costing IBM Australia the not inconsiderable amount of some $150,000 per annum (or maybe it was $250,000), so it was probably an understandable decision for the times.

But I can’t see how merely keeping online the Lotus Sandbox could be imposing any such unbearable cost on IBM Corporation.

So IBM,  please reconsider, and make available again the “knowledge biscuits” stored in the Lotus Sandbox.

1 comment:

  1. Yellowverse to the rescue: http://www.bananahome.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/DownloadPage?OpenForm

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.