Meeting Jeff Schick
by Volker Weber
Last night I got a text from IBM PR: Jeff wants to talk to you tomorrow at 9:15. I just got out of this meeting. It was the best 20 minutes we ever had together. Very candid and open, and almost everything was off the record. But I can put a few concerns to rest:
- IBM Verse will "ship" this month.There will be a paid offering and a free one. I hate the term "Freemium" for a product and I learned that some of Jeff's team think alike.
- The mail jail limits we have seen so far will change, up at least tenfold. IBM wants to keep the impolite people out, not limit your use of the product. IBM knows they got it wrong initially.
- Obviously I cannot pre-announce IBM offerings, but there will be a couple of announcements around Verse and cloud that sound very compelling to me.
There is no change in plan. IBM is not going to dump "freemium". There will be a free-to-use Verse and it will not be a "preview". It will be the real thing.
IBM has a lot of options to turn features on for the free version of Verse. I am mostly concerned about the onboarding process. How do you get your contacts into Verse for instance.
One big correction. Some people have floated a '500 million' number. That's off by three orders of a magnitude. 500 is correct, but you should have said thousand.
Comments
That's kinda cool from IBM's side. And kinda cool that Volker can produce that kind of traction from his website. Kudos to both!
That's most helpful. Thank you.