"the Lotus brand is springing back to life"
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In the late 1990s there was a vicious battle between Microsoft and IBM over marketshare (and, more crucially, mindshare) in the 'messaging' (=corporate email) market.
Lotus, purchased by IBM in the mid-1990s, was the clear market-leader, with its flagship Lotus Notes product. But Microsoft fought a hard battle with Exchange and Outlook, and the advantages of tighter integration into its flagship Windows and Office products gave it the upper hand. Certainly nobody would doubt that Microsoft won the battle for hearts and minds. The battle for actual software usage has always been harder to gauge, however, because of the lack of clarity in the statistics:
- Microsoft count every licence shipped as a 'user', even when that licence is part of a bundle - Small Business Server for instance - and may never be deployed or used
- IBM count the total number of Notes licences sold, and don't publicise any figures for customers currently on active maintenance - the only valid indicator of current usage
- etc
The accepted wisdom, at least that which has been encouraged by Microsoft's excellent marketing machine and permitted by IBM's equivocation and lack of direction from 2000 to 2005, is that "everybody" uses Exchange/Outlook these days, and that Lotus Notes/Domino is old hat, dead in the water, went out with the dinosaurs ... you get the picture.
However, the reality is perhaps slightly more confused and confusing. Certainly a large proportion of the world's largest businesses use Lotus Notes. And they continue to do so largely because of the strength of Lotus Notes as an integrated development platform. Many things which in small businesses can be run fairly informally or using manually intensive paper- or email-based systems, have to be done on a far more rigorous basis in a larger business, or the operation of the business will collapse under its own weight. It is this area of tactical but essential business applications where Lotus Notes has always been hard, perhaps even impossible, to beat. With its in-built multi-tier robust security, integrated user directory management, rapid-fire schema-less database structure, and multi-level application development tools (ranging from simple UI-based form-design, through fairly simple 'macro' and robust-but-accessible 'scripting' languages, to heavyweight Java options), applications that might take months to develop on another technology platform can be created in weeks or even days on Notes. No other platform has ever come close to providing that level of power and flexibility in a single product.
Microsoft has continued the battle against Notes, with an almost paranoid insistence on releasing a 'spoiler' announcement - in recent years generally just a re-heating of the previous one - to try to divert press attention away from the annual Lotusphere conference in January. Microsoft still has a bee in its collective bonnet about Lotus, and seems desperate to kill it. Incidentally, from the heyday of 1999/2000 when Lotusphere was attracting close to 10,000* attendees, it slumped to a relatively feeble 4000* or so. But in the last three years attendance has rapidly climbed back up towards the 8000* level.
So, why the gung-ho headline? Well, in June 2005 in Hannover IBM announced that there would be a major new release of Lotus Notes/Domino forthcoming. This was expected to be the biggest release since ... well, opinions vary, but "for about 10 years" would suffice. Unofficially, this was an IBM statement of recognition that the "Workplace" ('affectionately' now known as "DoesNotWorkplace") strategy was wrong-headed and not what its customers and markets actually wanted and needed.** A bold and overdue decision. In due course - just over 2 years later in August 2007 - Lotus Notes and Domino 8 was released. And what a huge leap forwards it was. But IBM/Lotus has not stopped there: we've had:
- Lotus Notes/Domino 8.0.1 in February 2008, including push email for Windows Mobile devices and more easy integration capabilities called "Livetext" and "Widgets"
- Lotus Symphony - a new free-to-use Office equivalent, announced as beta software in September 2007 and released as version 1 in May 2008 - and already downloaded 1.3 million times.
- Lotus Connections - an all-new 'social software' platform that has been very well received, in particular being considered vastly superior to SharePoint in the social software context
- Lotus Quickr - a re-working and major upgrade to the QuickPlace product
- Lotus SameTime - several new versions of this real-time collaboration suite, which has just passed the 100 million-seats-sold mark
- Lotus Protector - a forthcoming integrated suite of messaging security offerings, due then to be expanded to other security functions
- Lotus Foundations - a forthcoming 'run-your-business-on-a-single-server' solution, based on the acquired Nitix technology
- Lotus Same Unyte and Lotus Bluehouse - new/forthcoming hosted collaboration and web conferencing tools, sold on a subscription basis, and aimed at small/medium business.
- Lotus Notes/Domino 8.0.2 - due out Q4 2008
- Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5 - due out in 2008, and sporting amongst other things some all-new application development tools that promise to bring Notes/Domino development up to a comparable level with Visual Studio and other 'modern' tools
But ... Lotus has a new boss, Bob Picciano, who comes (a new thing for Lotus) from a marketing background. He took over in April, and it's taken him a few months to find his feet, but his influence is beginning, now, to be felt: on Thursday 31st July IBM released an uncharacteristically aggressive press release, labelling Exchange as "proprietary" (which it SO is - Microsoft's habit of defining 'proprietary' as meaning 'not made by Microsoft' has been particularly pernicious over the years), and releasing details of a number of key competetive wins over Microsoft over the last year. The original press release has already been covered in Australian ITWire and on a number of blogs; and, interestingly, on the investment site The Street, who said "the Lotus brand is springing back to life". The fact that IBM's share price has outstripped the market recently, and particularly has been leaving Microsoft's in the dust, may explain that investor-led interest.
So, are we heating up for a new battle between Microsoft and IBM? Well, yes and no. Yes, because this is clearly a sign that IBM might ("might") be preparing to step back into the ring to do battle. Which can only be a good thing for them and for the wider market. But, then possibly no: IBM's record is SO poor that "one swallow doth not a summer make" - we have to wait and see. And no because the battle is no longer just between IBM and Microsoft: there are other niche but growing players, including Zimbra and Google Apps. None of these, of course, can claim the full range of functionality that Notes does. But, that functional platform comes at a cost, and the cost is that you need a reasonable end-user computer to make it run, and your own infrastructure to host it on, neither of which are in tune with the trend (only one trend out of many, of course) towards 'cloud computing'.
Are we at Axiot pleased with IBM's new-found confidence? Yes.
Are we encouraged by the spirit behind that press release? Certainly.
Do we see a long-term future for Lotus Notes/Domino and the Lotus brand in general? With the right marketing, definitely.
Are we going to pull out of our Lotus activities and concentrate on other technologies? No, absolutely not.
Do we have faith that Lotus Notes/Domino is the "right" solution? Not in every case, of course not. But a lot of the time it can save customers vast amounts of money and headaches. Certainly, as an IT decision maker you ignore it at your peril.
So what happens now? Well, possibly we'll see a backlash from Microsoft, with even more aggressive language. And then, well, let's wait and see. One thing though: it won't be boring ...
* The Lotusphere figures are unofficial. IBM has tended to release figures for the good years and not for the bad ones, so we've just gone with the generally-accepted estimates for all years, to show the relativity between them. We didn't actually count everybody!
** We won't discuss the 'dark years' of 2002 to 2005 any further, for fear of raising our blood pressure to dangerous levels.
Today is the launch of the hew 'advanced search' capability for 
