07.05.2005 Henning Heinz |
Can a product be strong and weak at the same time? For the bad part, I think IBM Lotus Notes and Domino are 2nd class citizens in the IBM Websphere/Workplace umbrella. All new technology and innovation goes into the Next-Gen product line and lot of what is going to happen in Notes and Domino is recycled Websphere stuff. I do not doubt that Domino is going to be enhanced and that there will be V8,9,10 but it will probably only be Workplace stuff with a somewhat frozen Notes and Domino core. Consultants have to decide at a very early stage because no customer is going to pay them for learning new stuff. From the customers point of view. If budgets are small just sit and wait is a very comfortable position. So I still do not see mass migrations to Exchange or Oracle or even to Workplace. That is why IBMs Domino business can be good but consulting is hard stuff. I am still passionate about Notes and Domino (so my opinion do differ frome e.g. Volker Weber) and I still think that it would deserve a better, independant future. "And in 2003, we'll be delivering a revamped version of Notes, which in fact builds on top of WebSphere and uses some of the native XML services of DB2[...]" "After this year's R6 deliverable, the next version will be a WebSphere-based version." Steve Mills, March 2002 Here we are in 2005 and it is still there. This technology is so strong that even billion dollars pumped into Websphere and Workplace were not able to completely break it up. I am sure there are some people within IBM kept away from sleep cursing this 20 years old IT veteran that is just not going to die. And it might even survive the somewhat disappointing V7 release where there seems to be not a single Domino core improvement besides some generic performance enhancements (and of course the Workplace stuff). |
07.05.2005 Peter de Haas E-Mail http://www.peterdehaas.com |
RE: Can a product be strong and weak at the same time? Henning, I my (slidly coloured) opinion Notes V 7,8,9 an 10 have been created to ensure the very loyal Notes community doesn't move any sooner than that IBM has been able to create an equivalent in Workplace. But looking at one of the latest Ed Brill blogs the features in the new releases have become a very democratic process ... |
07.05.2005 Henning Heinz E-Mail |
RE: Can a product be strong and weak at the same time? Peter, most of the feature requests are not new. You will already find a lot of them in the Notes 5 beta forum, the Notes 6 beta forum, in the current V7 and maybe in ,8,9,10 too. So the voting is a very democratic process indeed (and has always been). It even gets better if you are a business partner (I am not) as you can raise your voice in the interal forum. And if IBM would really create an equivalent in Workplace I would not complain. Unfortunately what IBM thinks about doing Domino "right" in Workplace is not much different from what Microsoft thinks about good collaboration software. Both concepts, from my humble opinion, are broken so far (at least for SMB). Believe me if there would be more products in the the Notes & Domino category you would probably not speak about a loyal community. What makes the difference for me is that I still have hope that IBM will do it better while I have completely given up on Microsoft (although it works for many other). |
08.05.2005 PeterdeHaas E-Mail http://www.peterdehaas.com |
RE: Can a product be strong and weak at the same time? Sorry to hear that you've 'completely given up on Microsoft'. I realise that perception on Microsoft are all over the place, you would have to recognise that in the last 3 years (since the introduction of Office 2003) there has been a big push in the area of collaboration software. Don't forget it all started back in 97 with Exchange, so the whole history if you will is much more recent than that of Lotus. Look at what is happening in the RTC area (Live Communications Server, LiveMeeting) alone. This is not a company playing catch up, this is a company motivated to make a difference ... |
08.05.2005 Henning Heinz E-Mail |
RE: Can a product be strong and weak at the same time? Peter, I have just given up on Microsoft in doing something comparable to Notes not as a company itself (otherwise I would not have bought shares recently but this is more about the X-Box2 which I believe will put an end on Sonys dominance in this market). This is just a Notes perspective and not a general perception. And for RTC. I do not know if this is specific to Germany but selling this to customers is not easy here. But I must admit that a lot of my customers think about cakes when they hear of BlackBerries. |
08.05.2005 Peter de Haas E-Mail http://www.peterdehaas.com |
RE: Can a product be strong and weak at the same time? OK, I see RTC momentum building very rapidly in The Netherlands. From a Microsoft perspective this is partly because of the IP telephony integration and in relation to the large penetration of Office 2003 / SharePoint users. On the other hand more and more companies see the benefit of IM but more importantly Presence integration. XBox2 (XBox 360) communication starts this comoing Friday (13/5) as of 19:30 on MTV. Whatever external communication comes available I will certainly spend some blogs on :-). Let's hope the shareprice starts moving for you (and me). |