Slashdot Mirror
Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?
CWmike writes to mention that IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, a system designed to compete with GMail and Exchange that offers email, calendaring, and contact management. "Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year.
IBM is aiming the software at large enterprises that want to migrate an on-premise e-mail system to SaaS (software as a service), particularly for users who aren't tied to a desk, such as retail workers. It is also hoping to win business from smaller companies interested in on-demand software but with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months. LotusLive iNotes is based on technology IBM purchased from the Hong Kong company Outblaze."
Lotus Notes, no way in hell will it succeed. Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.
Lotus Notes is closer to Shit on a Shingle than it is a service.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
For $36/head you get 1gig of data storage vs. Google at $50/head gets you 25gig of storage. I have no idea how Notes has survived as long as it has. Crap hardly begins to either the notes client or server.
This will not take over the role of Exchange for the same reason Google won't take over the role of Exchance - for a lot of companies, having local control of their data and communications is key. Storing confidential data in the "cloud" (how I hate that term) is a security and privacy risk and a potential source of liability. Thanks to this, there will always be a demand for locally-run and locally-administered mail servers, and nothing really competes with Exchange in that realm.
Lotus Notes makes it clear where MS got their evil genes from. Because Lotus notes was released as both email client and MS Access equivalent, companies that adopteded it have found themselves hopelessly locked in. In the spirit of "getting things done" my company has allowed its users to create thousands of apps in our Notes system, making it impossible to ever switch to anything else. IBM has nice reliable income, and employees everywhere suffer.
you can improve all you want, but I'll take occassional outages from google if it means being able to easily figure out the interface when it is up.
IBM might claim 100% uptime but if I have to spend 150% more time figuring out their wacked out interface and shite product, i'd rather take my chances with google.
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?
No, because they branded it Lotus, thereby invoking a ton of dreadful baggage. If they'd called it some else, they might have had a chance.
P.S. Why is Slashdot slower than an old age pensioner snail crawling up a cliff covered in wet tar today? And why did Slashdot totally ignore the Google outage a week or so back?
P.P.S. From the article:
It's unlikely that IBM's pricing strategy will cause competitors to lower fees for their offerings, according to Cain. For one thing, Microsoft already has a $2 per month Exchange Online option called "Deskless Worker," Cain noted.
Lotuslive is an integrated online messaging service supplied through IBM purchased Outblaze
http://www.outblaze.com/index.php/corporate/
Lotus Notes and Microsoft are one of many SMTP/ IMAP clients supported.
My company is an IBM partner, and for political reasons we try to use lotus notes, or like we call it lotus jokes. The thing is the most un-user friendly piece of software I have ever used. Email addresses are stored like directory structures that make no sense. The calendar does not integrate with other meeting requests I get. The list goes on and on. Could be just how my company implemented it but man it sucks to use. Its not even close to google apps like gmail. or outlook and exchange, feels about 10 years behind its competitors.
I'm sure it'll be an instant hit!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
n/t
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
. . .hah haha hah hah.
Oh that was good.
Lotus Notes, iNotes, and all over it's incarnations is the most convoluted and insane system I've ever used (and this is after 4 years of admining a 400+ user Lotus Domino server). I've often heard the joke that Emacs would be a great OS if only it included a decent text editor. I've never felt it applied since I actually like emacs for text editing, but boy does the same type of line apply to Notes: it'd be a great OS if only it included a decent email client.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
This is another clusterf**k coming from India. IBM has done nothing but go downhill.
with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months
They better be able to offer guarantees stronger than Google's. I'm not sure what Gmail's Premier outage guarantees are, but for a new-comer to offer better would be surprising.
Also, $36 vs $50. $14 a year difference hardly justifies any potential UI frustration or maturity of product problems this may have.
...we'll call it eLotusLive iNotes. Dot com.
The "you have new email" icon looks more like you have a new burrito waiting. Seriously, who designed this thing? It still looks like the Lotus Notes I used back in '95 with the primitive looking GUI.
Businesses have become used to smart phones, the majority of which work with Microsoft Exchange. Phones have pre-loaded clients for Exchange, not for anything from Lotus. If iNotes can't play with current phones, it will be a non-starter.
"Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year."
IMO: it is bad to quote marketing statists BS. Instead the poster of this article should have paraphrased in a more fair comparison. like:
"Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs about $4.20 per user per month." ...OR...
"Pricing starts at $36 per user per year, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year."
Once I read the way this was quoted... I knew there was no value in reading further into this biased article.
In fact, I haven't a clue what this marketing campaign is about.
As soon as I saw the topic "Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?", my first thought was: Is 'i' the new IBM euphemism for Lotus? Because, if it is, we don't need to go any further.
IBM can't take on Google and Microsoft with anything based on traditional Lotus Notes, because Lotus Notes is the only software worse than Microsoft Exchange Server, and the reason Google's enterprise services exist and are popular is specifically that it frees people from Lotus Notes and Exchange. If iNotes is anything at all like Lotus Notes' architecture, it's a failure waiting to happen — because a Lotus Notes that was hosted "in the cloud", with IBM techs who can't get it to stop stalling and trashing its databases, wouldn't be any better than Lotus Notes in your main business office with IBM techs who can't get it to stop thrashing and stalling its databases. In fact, maybe Lotus Notes in your main office might be better, because then you'll have access to yank the hard drive and write a few nice Perl scripts to convert it all to a real system when your bosses finally learn to cut their million-dollar losses and throw IBM out. As for the IBM employee saying IBM runs "the world's mission-critical systems" — if they're on Lotus Notes, they must not be that critical, since they're unavailable so often.
I think you guys are underestimating this product. Sure, an on-site Notes deployment might be a bitch to manage, but you won't have to bother with that anymore. Also, take a look at the rest of the product line (LotusLive). It's actually quite impressive. Makes Google Apps look old.
The person who wrote this story cannot even normalize the pricing, if they work for IBM they don't have a chance at all.
Let's see: This IBM guy in the article is making noise about Google's uptime record versus "what you'd expect from IBM in terms of security, reliability and privacy" with Lotus Notes branded products? Wow. It's like he actually aimed before he shot himself in the foot.
...we'll call it eLotusLive iNotes. Dot com.
You forgot the "My" on the front, which is of course required for any website that includes any variable other than the a datestamp in the underlying programming code. my dot my-eLotus-eLive-iNotesCom dot com would be perfect for that. Now all they need is the linkless "Best experienced with Adobe Flash" background for the mandatory Flash file that redirects to a hostname on completely different domain than the entry page, and it will be completely innovative and fresh. (And I'd even use it if the only other choice were real Lotus Notes.)
Was anyone else surprised that Apple didn't already have this trademarked?
Beating Microsoft products on usability is not exactly a tough achievement. Personally I'd rather use post-it notes than Outlook.
Notes has come a long way. On the server side, it's vastly superior to Exchange - fewer servers required, true clustering for 100% uptime, lower hardware requirements with each version, runs on many platforms. The client got a bit bloated with the move to Eclipse, but the basic client is still available if you want speed over functionality. And it runs on open standards on several platforms. Why the hate?
Apple seems to try to claim they own the thought of calling anything iSomething. I figure it won't be a week till they start saying, hey, that is our name.
Zimbra gets underplayed. It's the Exhange killer that works well, easy to addminister, cross platform, mac/win/lin/winmo/web/outlook/etc. compatible. It has antivirus, antispam, archiving, clustering, scalable to nearly any size, ldap/AD integration, shared calendars, should I continue?
THIS IS IT, FOLKS!
Why doesn't it get more press?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
When I type webapp, Lotus Notes spell check suggests I change it to wetback. Ver 6.5. I wish I was joking. On further investigation, the 'big one' isn't in the dictionary, but gook is. Wow. Just wow.
How about when you have a message selected (but not opened) and try to export it? Starts exporting the entire mailbox with no cancel.
I offer this poll, Why does Notes suck so much?
*Search don't search
*Sort don't sort
*Cut and Paste from a webpage means grab some coffee
*UI stands for User Interference
*Blazing Speed
*Hit Yes to send with comments, No to send without comments, and cancel to bring you back to this same dialog
*Contextual nonsense
*Reply All to "undisclosed recipients" discloses the undisclosed recipients
I could go on for days, but I just copied this text into Notes to try to spell check it. Time for coffee.
Here's something to think about, to all of you declaring that Notes is crap.
The real enterprise class messaging world is split about in half between using Microsoft Exchange on the back end and using Lotus Domino on the back end. Different analysts will split it in different places, and different parts of the world will also vary the numbers a bit, but generally the market for enterprise messaging is about split in half with everyone else taking up a very small percentage.
So, the product that you're calling "absolute crap" seems to be one of the few in the software industry holding its own against a relentless Microsoft push for years on end. Why is that? The answer is because it is VERY good at doing what it does -- which is providing a messaging platform that is manageable and secure across really large enterprises with tens or hundreds of thousands of users.
Lots of products are better than Notes or Domino at one or two things, but no product has the breadth and scope of its features in an enterprise manageable application server. The closest thing to it would be an entire linux distro, with various packages performing roles similar to the tasks on a Domino server. It's not a great match up but it's a hell of a lot closer than comparing it to "Gmail" which is pretty good for EMAIL or to Exchange. Maybe if you compared it to Exchange + Outlook + Sharepoint + SQL Server + Office + Visual Studio. That's a fairly expensive comparison and totally unmanageable to deploy across tens of thousands of users.
What amazes me are the predictions of failure. Hello? It already succeeded! It makes a TON of money and keeps a LOT of people employed. I can certainly understand if you don't LIKE the product. There are things that are long overdue to be overhauled, for sure. Predicting the failure of something that has already succeeded though -- that's fairly moronic.
As someone pointed out, however, LotusLive iNotes is not Notes, not Domino based iNotes (which has won awards, by the way, for its user interface), but is in fact an entirely different platform specifically built to be a hosted mail environment that has nothing to do with the old Lotus Notes or the Domino server. So far, I don't recommend it.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
iNotes is Webmail. It's a web interface to the mailservers.
Gmail gives web access to Mail, Calendar, etc. and then you can access it with a client compatable with MS Exchange. What Gmail is to MS Exchange is what iNotes is to Lotus. It's a web interface for a lotus system.
What Gmail is to MS Exchange is what iNotes is to Lotus. It's a web interface for a lotus system.
Except that Gmail doesn't have the baggage of being associated with Microsoft or Lotus, and a name like "LotusLive iNotes" does. Even though they based it on Outblaze, if they put any Lotus back-end architecture into it since then, there's a good chance at it being a rolling failure waiting to happen. The luckiest thing that could happen to a LotusLive iNotes user is that it turns out the programmers have still kept it far away from any code from any other Lotus product whatsoever.
Zimbra is highly cost effective.
You can either outsource it or run it internally.
It scales to 100,000 users with enterprise calendaring, address books, shared folders, etc. Only the todo list isn't as good as what MS-Exchange offers.
There is a free, FOSS version and a paid support version, neither require CALs.
In my company, we only support the AJAX/Webmail version for users.
As an extra bonus, MS-Outlook doesn't work very well with the FOSS version. The paid version has all the outlook plugins you can stand, for a price.
So, start with the free version and add more and more users to it.
Full disclosure - I'm just a happy admin running Zimbra FOSS version in a Xen machine. No relationship to the company.
The responsiveness and clarity of Notes plus the reliability of Web 2.0
Let me kill myself now. Please.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
That is all
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
... it's time for a new version of Wernstrom's killbot.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No, seriously, hahahaha!
Words fail me.
Bloatus Goats. No way.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
This isn't the first incarnation of a web interface to Domino backend servers either. That function (such as it was) was available for years. At least as far back as 2005. Now the 'rich text format' they used...ick!
Blar.
As a daily user of Notes, I can attest that it is a HUGE STEAMING PILE OF PIG CRAP.
I would rather use carrier pigeons than that inane POS. Get this, our senior management got tired of hearing complaints about Notes and its legion of defects, so they decided to "hold a bake off" to determine which new groupware environment to invest in for our next upgrade. Exchange/Outlook or Notes.... We were all so excited because we could finally get rid of the daily nightmare that is Lotus Notes. Nope, no dice. IBM executives flew in to our corporate offices, and a week later we were starting the upgrade to the new version of Notes... Microsoft reps came in too, but they obviously could care less if we jam a flaming hot poker in our eye sockets by upgrading to the new version of Notes.... You can say a lot of negative (and well earned) things about Microsoft, but they clearly have a passion for improving their products, unlike IBM. I don't know if I've _EVER_ used a piece of IBM software that I was impressed by... at least 30 years ago you could give them the "stability" argument for their mainframe software.... now they literally have nothing. Their software is bug ridden, has 1,000,000 features that nobody uses, and the core functionality barely works.
I don't know about you, but most retail workers I've seen don't have access to Internet-connected computer at all, let alone email. I know quite a few people working in retail, they make about $9/hr (that's Canadian) and pretty much stick with Point of Sale systems.
I've just upgraded from 8.01 to 8.5 this past week. My PC at work is a Dell Precision 380 Workstation (circa early 2005) with a single 3.06GHz Prescott P4 and 1GB memory, running 32-bit Windows XP Pro SP3. The full Lotus 8.5 Client (Eclipse version, not the C++ "basic" version) starts up and gives me my inbox, ready to open emails in under 20 seconds. That's not too shabby for a vintage PC that's pushing half a decade old, and running all kinds of other crap in its startup settings.
I'm still running the 8.01 Domino server on a 32-bit Win 2003 Dell PE2950 server, and need to upgrade to 8.5 on the server, and also change the server OS to 64-bit Windows to make better use of memory.
The Lotus 8.01 Eclipse client was slow as next Christmas to open up and give access to the inbox, but 8.5 is much improved in startup speed.
I can see if you're trying to run the full Lotus client on too old and slow of a machine, say a 1.8-2.0GHz Celeron with 128MB memory or something like that, then yeah you will be performing an exercise in futility, but the 8.5 Lotus client runs just fine on real contemporary PC hardware.
Man... Just HOW does IBM keep sellin' this stuff?
Easy! They bypass the techies and go to the pointy-haired boss who knows nothing about Information technology.
But he knows that IBM is (or was) a "big player in the corporate world.
This sales technique was true THIRTYFIVE (35) years ago, and I guess it is still true today.
I take that back. Make it FORTY years ago.
-
Extracting sunbeams from
This is not related to IBM Lotus Notes/Domino code - it is not the robust IBM Lotus Domino Server on the backend, and does not come with support for the superior IBM Lotus Notes client. It was based on the code from the Outblaze purchase - which has 40million mailboxes with basic web/POP/IMAP access - the browser experience has been enhanced and branding under the much cooler IBM LotusLive brand.
IBM/Lotus had a great product there - an excellent PIM, good word processor and the venerable 1-2-3 spreadsheet. They absolutely walked away from it years ago, stranding millions of users.
If any of you smart guys are interested, there are still many users of Lotus Organizer PIM who have no way to sync it with Outlook or Google's products. It would seem to me a pretty simple project to write a sync program, and it would be marketable. If you want to discuss it, (I can't do it; the last thing that I programmed was on punch cards) contact me at daviddd75710 at yahoo.
I think more options would be available to Notes if it were finally open sourced. One of the biggest reasons it's not succeeded, in my opinion, is the closed proprietary environment -- this locks people in, like a drug addiction. Open source it - open it to other API's, change the business model and I think it would fly.
Can anyone figure out how or why a product whose users hate it in the majority (from my own personal polling) is still being sold?
Where do we go to vote Lotus Notes off the island?
So, the product that you're calling "absolute crap" seems to be one of the few in the software industry holding its own against a relentless Microsoft push for years on end.
The two things are not mutually-exclusive, you know.
Also, what people say is "absolute crap" is Lotus Notes. And it *is* absolute crap, so, you know. You seem to be talking about Domino, instead... Domino may or may not be any good (I don't have the experience to judge), but as long as the part that the general public sees is Lotus Notes, then they're going to call it crap.
And yah it's holding its own against Microsoft. God only knows why-- my assumption has always been because IBM sells directly to the CxOs of a company, and those people don't actually use email.
Comment of the year
...and often very badly managed. The biggest problem it has on the desktop is that it's big and powerful, but cumbersome and heavy as well. If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.
People don't like it. Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downtime, the exchange servers are down for a LONG time as databases have to be rebuilt.
The biggest thing that Notes users suffer from, is that Notes is a very different kind of tool and they (users) get stuck with bad in-house applications that are ugly, poorly performing, and not well matched to business processes. No wonder people are frustrated.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.
I've yet to see a single Notes application worth running. The email client, as bad as it is, seems to actually have the *best* UI in the Notes ecosystem-- the whole product is so amazingly bad, I literally think it's impossible to make a good UI, no matter how much effort you put into it.
Kind of like Java, in that respect. Sure, it has tons of fans who constantly rave about how you can make completely native and good UIs, and maybe it is *possible* with an extreme level of effort, but in reality I've never actually seen one.
Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downtime, the exchange servers are down for a LONG time as databases have to be rebuilt.
Oh please. Nobody's ever experienced that with Exchange.
And, frankly, even if I had... having to use Notes every day for two years, or have 3 days of downtime every year? Give me the downtime, NO QUESTION ABOUT IT. Even if you're right about the downtime (and again, you're in a fantasy-world right now), it's still better than having to use a client that bad all the time. Hell, Exchange's yearly downtime is probably less than it takes Notes to just load every morning.
The biggest thing that Notes users suffer from, is that Notes is a very different kind of tool and they (users) get stuck with bad in-house applications that are ugly, poorly performing, and not well matched to business processes. No wonder people are frustrated.
What really annoys me is that it's not like Notes is cheap to make up for it. IBM charges through the nose, companies pay, and nobody's happy. WTF!
They must have the best sales staff in the world.
Comment of the year
I think you should cut back a little on reading about the Bastard Operator From Hell.
The Lotus Notes experience is somewhat like delivering your email via shouting out the window, while a midget punches you repeatedly in the balls. And that's BEFORE the Domino admin decides to move your profile to another server and fuck everything up even more.
I bet iNotes will be just as good. No, seriously.
Wow man, you've just worked that out?? That's why IBM (and everyone else like HP/EDS WTF, India, Microsoft) focus on the big end of town... the decision makers and come in and outsource everyone to India. Why focus on some IT boffin in the back room looking after Notes or Exchange... WHO CARES.