Slashdot Mirror
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."
Being a former Domino/Notes admin, I can honestly say that the system sucks. It's counter-intuitive, poorly documented, slow and overly complex.
Unless you have a killer-app that only runs under domino, I'd stay away from it.
Though i have no first hand experience in this, i have it on good autority from my friends who do corporate server installations for both lotus notes and exchange, that lotus notes is not particularly friendly or... whats the word... good. but like i said i have never installed either package.
Salesmen will push what they make the most money on, period.
We sold Apples to folks who wanted PCs cause we'd make $100 spiff on a Mac box but 5% of the profit off the sale with PCs. Considering stuff was sold at or near or sometimes under cost, it was flog the extended warranty, sell Macs or starve. Got good at selling Macs....
Our Dell rep came in with squishy toys wondering with his rah rah speech why we weren't selling all Dells, to which we said sorry pal, we make nothing off selling a Dell, show us the money and we'll flog as many as you can make.
This was lost on him, he was trying to sell Dell on its technical merits... what the hell did the other salespeople care, they knew nothing about computers, and their customers wanted the "Color TV" one where the "hard drive" lay flat so you could put the "TV" on it.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute). I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding. The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues). That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server. And yes, Exchange CAN handle also shared calendar data etc. but so can IMAP and that was wat a lot of customers used it for while Exchange had performance problems when a secretary opened more than 3 executive calendars at the same time.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
How many people could $300 million employ?
Hmm...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Wow! IBM is open sourcing Lotus Notes and Domino? They really believe in the Open Source development model! That's an absolutely amazing mov...
Oh, what's that? The actual mail product they're selling is every bit as proprietary as exchange?
Gotta love the marketing department that can actually say the above quote with a straight face while being so hypocritical at the same time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The other thing to remember here is that Lotus Domino and the other IBM business offerings do run on Linux. So it is on an open platform. As much as I love Pine for e-mail, business users (especially management) is going to want something with more features. So while yes, you are using a proprietary solution, you're using one made by a company embracing open standards instead a proprietary solution on a proprietary platform produced by an almost exclusively proprietary company.
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
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? Wow!
Well duh. Who would've thought that a corporation would spend money to get people to use their product. And no, they probably aren't any more trustworthy. They are after all a large multinational trying to increase profits.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Well, IBM stopped sending us new versions of the client despite our support contract being active, so I haven't had a chance to try 7... we're still stuck on 6.5. I can't imagine it's improved much.
But even if you're using 7, you have to think to yourself: "It took them until version 7 before Notes could sort by subject line? One of the MOST BASIC FUNCTIONS of a list box, and Notes couldn't manage it without 6 revisions?" Mail.app from Apple could sort by subject line in version 1.0... amazing!
It only took until Notes version 6 for it to cleanly support multi-user OSes also. Windows NT had only been out, what, a DECADE, before Notes decided to support it? Oh, but it still puts its own data in Local Settings, so if you want to use Roaming Profiles and Notes, you're SOL.
But my major gripe is that F5 doesn't refresh. Not only does it not refresh, but pressing the key (expecting it to refresh) actually locks you out of the product and you have to re-enter the password to get back in. It's not just a bad user interface, it's actually user-hostile.
Comment of the year
As an aside, why do all groupware products suck? Groupwise sucks. Domino/Notes sucks. Exchange/Outlook sucks.
Maybe because software in and of itself has become a "necessary" part of business in industries that as recently as 10 years ago didn't have to rely on software.
Much of the chatter encouraged by such communication systems is just background noise and a lot of corporate activity is just busywork. For really important projects (I mean building a bridge, process plant or skyscraper) you don't want to rely on being able to reach one critical person via email or groupware. You use the phone for that.