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IBM Challenges Microsoft With an Ad Campaign
Rytis writes "IBM is about to spend $300 Million dollars on a campaign to win customers and to convert them from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes and Domino under Linux. IBM is also said to offer resellers a bounty of $20,000 for switching customers to its Linux-based e-mail programs from Microsoft server software. It seems that the concurrence Microsoft Corp. is facing is getting tighter and tighter. The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."
And even if they are dead on in their marketing campaign, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable they piggyback so strongly on Linux. I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?
l inux/projects.jsp
Where have you been? If it was not for IBM sco would be suing other linux users for a scosource license. see: groklaw.org
They have only contributed to 94 linux projects... you can see the very small list here:http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/
I imagine many Slashdotters will have little idea what Lotus Domino does that anyone would care about. The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate. So, for example, you can synch some subtree dealing with a topic you're interested in to your laptop, work with and edit it offline while (say) flying from Sydney to New York, and then resynch when you're next online. This is definitely useful, non-trivial functionality.
Domino does a bunch of other stuff but the offline/remerge functionality is the fundamentally cool thing it does that other products don't do. As, say, an email client and calendar, Domino is a pretty horrible.
I used Lotus Notes for several years while working for a big consulting firm. It was one of the worst designed, ugliest programs ever. It had groundbreaking functionality (see above) but even then it was easy to imagine something better, easier to use, and easier to administer.
Domino can still do some very useful things (again, see above) Exchange can't do, or does very poorly (indeed Exchange is worse than either IMAP or POP at dealing with offline clients -- and Notes is substantially better). It seems to me that there ought to be web-based tools that do everything EXCEPT the offline component far better than Domino or Exchange do, and more cheaply and simply, but I don't think Domino has a significant competitor in terms of its offline functionality (more's the pity).
The estimated TCO for a laptop PC back in 1997 was somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. The estimated TCO for a single Lotus Notes client was $9,000 -- Domino's functionality is great, but it ain't cheap. This would be of academic interest if Lotus Domino had improved substantially in usability or reliability in the nine years since, but by all accounts it is basically the same.
Sometimes I'm not sure what IBM is thinking. I don't "get" this campaign. IBM is spending $300M on a campaign to convince customers to switch from MS' propietary to their propietary message product?
Umm. What do you expect? They have a product. They're advertising it. This is shocking?
I find this invitation disingenuous, dishonest, and ethically bankrupt at best.
As far as proprietary is concerned, as far as I can see it plays nice with standards where standards exist for the things it does. It does not extend standards in a noncompatible way either. This seems reasonable for a proprietary program. I think it's clear that IBM is selling Domino, so I don't see what your beef is.
overloaded at least in the context of an e-mail/calendaring product..
Bingo. The problem is that it has always been more than email and calendar; trying to position it as a competitor to Exchange has only made the product confusing. The situation has only become more confusing as new product categories evolve that conver part of what Notes does, for example content management. Notes just isn't a clean fit into any of the product categories people are accustomed to.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lets get a few things straight given that I actually KNOW THE F'ing products involved:
/. it by linking it here).
/.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?
1. Notes has an odd UI with some challenges, we agree on that. Of course, that's because it was DESIGNED TO BE CROSS PLATFORM. In fact, the next rev includes a LINUX CLIENT.
2. Notes is VERY STABLE. I am personally aware of a major financial firm where 12,000 users are doing mail, calendaring, I.M., discussions, and workflow applications with the support of less than 15 people. They have had no outages. They have had no works.
3. Notes is inherently secure. It was doing public/private key encryption from day 1, back in the late 80's and is still doing so. It even supports PKI plug ins. Apparently, it was the only one because nobody else ever made any.
4. The notes CLIENT is inherently secure. It use execution control lists and design elements are signed. There are not worms or trojans that use Notes to replicate because THEY CAN'T.
5. Notes is OPEN. Yes, it uses a proprietary storage and transport format, but it also FULLY SUPPORTS XML for every design and and data element. It also includes Java (w/ IIOP and CORBA as well) object models, COM object models, and a published XML schema. It FULLY SUPPORTS MIME, SNMP, SMTP, LDAP (as client or server), NTP, HTTP, SSL, DIIOP, WEBDAV, WEB SERVICES (as client or server), ODBC.
6. Notes is PROGRAMABLE. Its objects are openly accessable and it includes full support for JAVA, Javascript, and its own Lotusscript and formula language.
7. Domino (the server) is MULTI-OS cross platform. It runs EQUALLY WELL on Linux, AIX, Solaris (in the past, and soon again) iSeries (OS400). I even know of one web accessible server running on Linux on XBOX! (no, I'm not going to
8. Notes owns roughly 50% of the corporate mail and calendaring marketing. No, not in small business or home use, but in major corporations.
9. Notes & Domino are backward compatible. No rip and replace upgrades. EVER. I can take a version 8 beta client and open a version 2 application (that I have) and it will WORK. Now. It is cheaper to upgrade to Domino 7 from Exchange 5.5 than to upgrade to Exchange 2000 or 2003 from the Exchange 5.5.
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So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?
I'm not sure the exact details of IBM's direct support of Linux, but they develop tools for it and on it. The ServeRAID Manager CD and other bootable tools run on Linux kernels, and the latest ServeRAID-8i adapter runs Linux onboard as well. The DSA tools will run on Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell server editions. Apparently an entire IBM division is considering switching to Linux. And of course, as mentioned in the article, their commercial software offerings run on Linux.
There are various ways of supporting things. Giving money is one way, and actually using and promoting the use of them is another.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
What you're missing is that Lotus Notes works with Outlook.
/ product1.nsf/wdocs/accessmsoutlookhome
Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook.
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products
Keep the Outlook client, but use Domino as the back end, and you can scale up to hundreds of thousands of users on a single server, rather than crapping out at 3000 or so.
(Disclaimer: I work for IBM. Opinions mine, not IBM's.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak