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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."
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!
From the Seattle PI article:
I'm not sure I see this as a clarifying move. I see it only as another product offering. I've used Lotus Notes and worked with it many times. It has lots of interesting features, but I found it obtuse and overloaded at least in the context of an e-mail/calendaring product... the business world probably doesn't need or care about yet another e-mail.
And, IBM is couching this under the comforting and (maybe) enticing siren of Linux and open systems? Wow! A paragraph from the Bloomberg article:
I find this invitation disingenuous, dishonest, and ethically bankrupt at best. I'm a huge fan of Linux, and hope for its eventual place in the business world (which I would submit it already has... except we all still have to whisper about it), but I think IBM is miscalculating on this.
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?
I've worked with IBM throughout the years and my experience has been they are not too much different than Microsoft in their commitment to Unix platforms, i.e., it's a pill they'll swallow or pretend to swallow if it makes them look willing to play in the Open Source community.
IBM has diverted Unix technology before (anyone played with AIX before???), I fear they're using it today for personal (corporate) gain. I know corporation's responsibilities are to be as profitable as possible, but this smacks of lip service.
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.
Hmmm. Last time I used Lotus, I thought, arrgh, what a POS. Clunky clients, flaky servers. Why are they pushing that, and not investing 1% of that 300 million in developing/extending some server based on Groupware.
Exchange is good for what it does, and users scream loudest when their email goes down. So I expect companies will be loath to change their entire messaging system. Especially to Notes.
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It's 12:05AM. Last year *every single story* for about 24 hours was a lame joke.. how am I to believe this one?
Probably will avoid slashdot for about 36 hours just in case.
Whoa, IBM wants people to switch from the at-least-ok proprietary MS solution to their own we-have-the-worst-software-in-the-world, a-thousand-interface-designers-sacrified-every-day , lotus-notes-making-your-brain-melt-since-1996, interface-standards-are-not-for-us-goddamit Lotus Fucking Notes?
Woohoo, fucking win, that's not even being between a rock and a hard place, that's being in an erupting volcano and seeing a frigging Chicxulub-class asteroid falling on you (that'd be a 10km diameter asteroid, 6mi for our metrically challenged american friends).
And don't listen to anyone telling you that Notes is great and that it rocks your socks, it's been proven that only Notes developers can utter praises for that piece of donkey poo, they're merely trying to keep their jobs.
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Concurrence?
I imagine that competition was meant. You don't talk about "tight concurrence"--"tight" is usually used in conjunction with "competition" to describe particularly a particularly fierce and aggressive competitive environment. Of course, the sentence which immediately follows is also a fragment, adding grammatical insult to the vocabulary injury.
I know it's hard to moderate the thousands of user submitted articles we get here, but these are concepts taught in English classes at the elementary school level.
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.
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Maybe it would make more sense for IBM to build an exchange replacement that is actually good, and then advertise the hell out of it? I think if they spend a lot of money on calling peoples' attention to Notes, it will just backfire.
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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.
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Oops, guess I forgot the tag in the subject line. Notes is an intriguing concept of storing information in hierarchical "documents" but a number of things make it difficult to use. I spent months at my last company converting Lotus Notes applications that someone had written into an Oracle database with a web front end. One thing interesting though about Notes, when we sent an e-mail to Australia from the U.S. asking for a read receipt, the receipt gladly told us that our message "was read tomorrow".
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Having worked for IBM in the past and having been forced to use Notes as my desktop email client, it's difficult for me to comprehend why they'd make it the centerpiece of their assault on Microsoft. Powerful, yes, but also terrible to use as an end-user.
> The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had.
It isn't so much that the Penguin has powerful friends, but that Microsoft has powerful enemies. How about a Warcraft scenario: Bill in Borg weeping as he runs through the swamp, pursued by big war trolls and a very angry penguin!
All I can say is.. STAY AWAY!!
Outlook may be pretty evil, what with sending RTF e-mails.. But then.. so does Lotus Notes! It manages to 'retain' formatting from other applications when copy-pasting when it's entirely inappropriate, even (like, pasting some text from a webpage, bam! different font). It doesn't download attachments when you get your mail, but when you do download it, it doesn't add it to its 'local mail database', but let's you save it somewhere. Get the attachment from e-mail again because you deleted it from your filesystem, you have to download again. Calendering, sure, nice. But buggy as hell. Rescheduling usually doesn't work, you can read invites from Outlook users, but (sometimes) not accept them, or when you accept them, they don't get notified. "Replicating" databases takes ages, and doesn't in fact allow you to work offline. The client isn't noticibly multithreaded, you have to wait for a download to finish before being able to do something else. The client is a huge bloated binary, and it writes huge ass 'database' files to your disk. When you kill the client (which you often have to do as some actions lock the client up completely, though you'd like to cancel them), you have to log off and login again to restart it. It comes with transparant encrypted connections to its server - but it's not on by default. There is no clear way to mark a message unread!! I had to endure a few weeks of "tip of the day" messages to find out the INSERT button marks messages read/unread. No context menu option for that. Making a todo note? Not by using a menu option in the To-Do part of your screen, but you have to focuse the ToDo canvas, and then go to the client's main menu and select "create Todo". It uses proprietary mail protocols that don't add the usual RFC 2822 headers, and RFC 2822 headers from internet mail are really hard to get at. It makes you confirm unicode (utf-8) encoding for a message TWICE, even though it selects it by default when you type an accented character. It's slow and unresponsive. Did I mention the address books don't work properly? And no auto-complete?
This might all be fixed in later and greater versions (i have no idea what version I'm on now, I think 6.5 or something).. But compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend!
Yeah. Compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend.. Just imagine how crappy Lotus Notes must be, for that comparison to hold!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
Lotus Notes is an incredible platform. It does just about everything.
... look). Then spend $50 million on getting the word out.
Unfortunately, most companies just want something that will handle the email and calendaring with Outlook.
Instead of putting $300 million into this stupid ad campaign, spend $250 million on a basic corporate email server that handles email and calendaring that works with Outlook (or clone the Outlook
Start small and build up. Lotus Notes is anything but small.
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.
I work for IBM and use Notes every single friggin day, all friggin day. Overly complex and bloated is an understatement. It's absolute crap. $300 million seems like enough to start from scratch and create something decent. If I didn't have to use it, I never would..
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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.
Lotus Notes is cool, but it can be a pain.
It would kind of interesting to see Notes take off again... Basically you can use it like outlook and then combine MS access in it for custom databases. However, somethings are still a big pain that make Outlook look good. (no pun intended)
If you need just email, setup an imap and use Thunderbird for your client.
If you just need email and calendering then Outlook might be what you want (or maybe Groupwise if you are old school).
If you need email, calenders, custom database development tied into your email, plus tons of other stuff... Then Notes is your program. Hey they even have a OS X client that is way better than MS's Entourage.
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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
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I found you can force a refresh by clicking on another mail folder then clicking back on the Inbox.
And how much productivity have you lost due to people having to call IS every time they want to change their password because it's hard-as-hell to figure out how to do it? What about the angry calls you get when Notes gets confused and deletes emails you didn't intend to? (Sometimes Notes makes 'shortcuts' to emails when you move them into folders instead of copying the mail; then you delete it from your inbox and the email in the folder disappears also.)
How much time is spent managing email folders and rules that other email clients do automatically? How much money wasted on training users to know what "replication" is and when to use it? Heck, how much time is wasted in a year from the 45-50 seconds it takes Notes to even *display* an email if it had the misfortune of being swapped out of RAM?
How many meetings are missed when Notes' calendars get corrupt and stop sending out reminders? Or if you get one of those fun meetings that actually ends *before* it begins, because Notes doesn't even do the most basic sanity-checking on incoming data? How about the extra cost to make your Palms, Blackberries, and PocketPCs work with Notes, and the lost time having to use "Force Full Synchroniztion" in EasySyncPro every week?
Sorry, Domino might be solid, but that doesn't excuse all the other flaws in the product. And if you add it all up, it's just not worth it. It's not worth the cost, it's not worth the stress.
Ask your users if they like using Notes. Seriously. You'll be surprised at all the colorful replies you receive.
Comment of the year
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
I've been running lotus notes for 5 years now, and the reason why we didn't switch to exchange?
Because to scale exchange to support the number of users we have, we'd need to deploy *FARMS* of intel boxes.
Oddly, it's been about two years since we had to reboot our iSeries (AS/400). Yeah, it's not as sexy as running 100s of windows or linux servers. As it's just a pair of clustered boxes in the corner, each running multiple LPARs that serve to provide redundancy for the other. But it just works, plain and simple.
It only requires 15 people to support the entire environment.
We use Exchange to support email and calendaring for at least twice that number, and it takes 1-2 of us to support it part time. It pretty much takes care of itself. The only downtime we've had since upgrading to 2003 was when a third-party backup app started locking up one of the servers every weekend.
I'm not a huge MS fan, and I do tend to like IBM, but Notes is a pile of shit. The only thing I ever liked about it was the hieroglyphics when I entered my password, and I still thought that didn't belong in an enterprise desktop app. It's not a matter of redesigning it or adding new features - the whole concept is flawed. Email and calendar apps go together - that's why Outlook is so popular. Email, calendar apps, the worst database product evar, and whatever else IBM decided to shovel into Notes for the releases after 5 do not belong in the same executable.
Notes is such a terrible product that I thought this article was one of the April Fools' jokes.
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