The much-maligned email and calendar software, formerly and more disdainfully known as Lotus Notes, has been cited by a range of departing executives recently as one of the things they disliked most about working for the holding company. It crashes all the time, it’s not intuitive, and it’s generally “old and clunky,” they say. Don’t even mention the near-useless webmail access. For a holding company that loves to brag about how digital it is, it sure does give employees archaic technology for the most basic of modern communication.
“Emails would take hours, and sometimes days, to be delivered through the Notes servers,” said former Digitas CEO and current Weather CEO David Kenny. “It became common practice to text people to have them watch for and confirm sent emails. The redundancy drove me crazy.”
It’s really easy to fly off the handle on this article, but I think that it served a purpose. What that purpose was, I’m not totally certain, as the whole story isn’t told, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. Leave it to the commenters on the article to ask some intelligent questions, which will never be answered. In the past, I have written to the authors of these sorts of articles, asking for more details, only to have those messages go unanswered. Color me surprised.
The other Publicis news. I wonder what messaging system Omnicom runs?
Gregg Eldred 