IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS

Deviant writes "Speaking as an IT consultant, the one big gap in the Linux stack is in messaging / collaboration. MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product on which many businesses truly rely, and it is almost impossible to match on Linux — server or desktop. The one competitor to MS in this space has been IBM's Lotus Notes / Domino, which has always had the general reputation of being expensive, bloated, and unfriendly. I certainly wouldn't have considered it for the small businesses that we usually sell on MS's SBS server product. That is why I was truly surprised to hear about the new Domino Express Licensing and Notes 8. This is a product that has native server and client versions for both Mac and Linux. Notes 8, now written in Eclipse, also includes an integrated office suite, Lotus Symphony. This could conceivably let a user do all of their work in one application. And you can now license the server and client components together for as low as $100/user. It's packaged for companies of 1,000 seats or fewer. Is this the silver bullet to take out the entire MS stack — server, client, and Office? Or will IBM drop the ball yet again?"

Comments

Re:Written in Eclipse?

[Mechanik]

Yes, they did. In 2004, according to that link.

-1 Wrong

... and I'm not even sure why you'd say the link that gave you that impression. The Eclipse codebase was started by OTI, which was bought by IBM. The Eclipse Foundation was then started to provide a neutral governing body to act as a steward for Eclipse. So, given that IBMers created it, and many of those same IBMers are still working on it, I'm not sure how you can say they've wrestled it away from whomever originally started it.

See the Wikipedia entry on Eclipse's history