Armchair Theorist

As the old English proverb goes: All good things eventually must come to an end.

This past week was my last week working at IBM.

And since Monday, I have started a new and exciting role with Microsoft as part of their Developer and Platform Evangelism Team in Singapore.

Yes, I’m moving from one empire to another empire.

I am moving from the company commonly known as “Big Blue” to the company Wall Street investors lovingly nicknamed “Mister Softee“.

Let’s start with the old…

The two things that I will miss most about IBM:

It goes without saying - #1 is definitely the people there; the wonderful colleagues and friends which I’ve had the pleasure to work with and know at a personal level over the past three years.

#2 is perhaps surprising to some - I will greatly miss the plethora of tools that IBM made available to us which enabled each and every one of its employees to be as productive as they could be.

Now, IBM gets a lot of flack for being a dinosaur; a company that is stuck in the past making boring and old-fashioned software. However, most people do not realize that IBM is one of the most progressive and innovative companies in the industry today as far as leveraging Web 2.0 and social computing software in order to make its employees work together better and more efficiently.

IBM has “enterprise” versions of practically all of the social media tools that are available today on the consumer web.

You like Facebook? IBM has Fringe and BeeHive - a social network-enabled employee directory on steroids which allows everyone to post photos and other content, as well as use tags to describe each others’ job functions.

You want delicious? IBM has Dogear - an intelligent social bookmarking tool which doubles as an excellent complement to IBM’s search engine when trying to navigate through the vast library of resources residing within IBM’s Intranet.

What if you fancy Basecamp? Well, IBM has a tool called Activities - an innovative way for employees to quickly assemble together and organize actionable information for short-term ad-hoc projects.

And some IBM tools like Cattail are an absolute time saver. Cattail is essentially a social network around web-based file sharing, which allows employees to easily discover and leverage relevant documents and assets (such as presentations) which other IBM employees have created.

And of course things like blogs, wikis, communities and forums are a given.

Most of these tools are developed internally from IBM Research - the same guys who brought the Internet the amazing Wordle application. And for tools that have overwhelmingly proven themselves, they are productized into customer offerings like IBM’s Lotus Connections social software suite.

A few months ago, Robin Fray Carey from Social Media Today wrote an interesting whitepaper on how IBM leverages social media tools from mashups to virtual words in order to do make its employees more productive. Check it out - it’s a very good read.

I will definitely miss these tools.

…and onto the new!

I can’t comment much yet on work life at Microsoft, since I barely just started.

However, I will say that I love the fact that everyone at Microsoft has so much unbridled passion towards the company and the technology that it is absolutely contagious. Everyone here is a believer.

Microsoft is no slouch in research and innovation either. And Microsoft is also the only company that has the unique market position of being able to cover the entire computing spectrum, from consumer to enterprise, from online to offline, from desktops to electronics. This versatility and breadth is the single most attractive thing to me about the company.

I am definitely looking forward to working here at Microsoft. I am a believer too.

See Also:

• MythBusters: Debunking Enterprise Social Software Myths
• Yes, IBM and Microsoft Do “Get” Enterprise 2.0
• Visualizing your Blog Using Wordle