Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : RE: Fitness for a particular purpose

While I agree that lotus would never overtake Outlook Express I think it's silly to just give up and market just towards the corporate user when Outlook/Exchange is still your biggest competitor in the corporate market.

If it's your competitor in the corporate market, why would you sell to anyone
else but your market?

Either that or Lotus should drop the client completely and make Inotes for Outlook actually work correctly.

Ah, well... the client/browser schizophrenia is a bit of a problem, as I was
pointing out back in the 4.0 days. It hasn't really gotten any easier.

It took time for I.E. to overtake nescape in the browser market. At one time Netscape had 90% market share for web browising and I.E. was complete crap, this was the pre 4 releases of I.E which were terrible. Then MS stepped it up and after a couple of years netscape is a small small player in the browser market. This shows you can overcome what seems like an impossibility and also that MS will do anything to win and they will eventually beat Lotus out of the corporate market.

What it shows is that if you control the operating system and you're willing to
give away software for free as part of it, it's easy to surpass a competitor.
What it also shows is that writing a browser that's better than Netscape 3
isn't very hard to do. IE 4+ was CONSIDERABLY a better browser than Netscape
4+, and Netscape did not manage to keep up. (Mozilla and derivatives are
promising, yes, but not to the credit of Netscape.)

But all of this is ultimately moot, since the corporate e-mail market's
relationship to the personal e-mail market is completely different from the
corporate browser market's relationship to the personal browser market.
Basically, corporate & personal browser environments are identical markets,
while the needs of personal email vs. corporate email are substantially
different.

I and all other domino admins and developers had better learn some other skills quickly cause if Lotus rests on it's butt in the corporate sector it is already over.

Where are they resting in the corporate sector? In fact, they're saying that
they don't want to waste time and resources on anything BUT the corporate
sector, which means NOT working on a consumer focus for the Notes client.

If anything it just really irks me the attitude Lotus has towards this and towards multi platform compatiblity.

There was a day (R3 & 4) when Lotus put a heavy focus on multi-platform
CLIENTS. It didn't pay. The UNIX flavors all died on the vine. And virtually
no one was doing development work on the Mac. But they *were* there before, so
you can't say the decision to discontinue was made blindly.

They are so blase with their freakin why bother attitude it almost make me wish they would lose out,

You're getting a little emotional here, Mark. I understand your concern, but
seriously, what platform are they blase about? Linux CLIENTS!? That's about
it. Mac Designer if you're being retentive, but honestly, I think we'll see
third party tools fill that niche in the next year or so.

excpet for the fact this skillset puts food on my table right now which then makes me ticked off again that Lotus seems content to not market the product at all and has given up on user acceptance and multi platform useage.

Marketing... well, I have some problems there, too, but it's hardly none at
all. I'm curious what user acceptance testing you think *didn't* happen with
ND6, particularly since there was a very large and public prerelease program
right here.

And multi-platform usage? Look, *Domino* is schizophrenic about the native
client vs. the browser. Resolving that is an enormous challenge, but I'm not
clear how you can say that Lotus doesn't support multi-platform when you can
get Domino on, what, 8 different platforms? And everyone of them can be
accessed by a browser, which is probably the *MOST* multi-platform thing you
can do now.

The vagarities of Mozilla vs. IE are still annoying, but you can blame that as
much on the W3C as Lotus, and they *are* working on it.

Why can't Lotus be ahead of the curve right now?

Who *is* ahead of the curve? If you ask me, ahead of the curve means leaning
on smarter neutral clients via XML, which Lotus is *extremely* well-positioned
to do. But no one else is there either.

Companies are looking for ways to have non MS and non Intel workstations they want to run Linux they just can't because companies like Lotus won't support it.

MS and Intel are not the same thing. There are more Linux boxes running on
Intel hardware than all other chipsets combined. It's no secret that you can
run a Domino server on Linux. You can certainly access Domino applications via
Mozilla on Linux. Lotus is clearly working on getting the key DOM applications
in Domino to work with Mozilla (web admin & iNotes). And if you don't think
that the forthcoming "next-generation design tool" won't run on Windows, Mac &
Linux, and generate WebDAVable DXL that translates directly to Notes
applications -- well, may I suggest thinking about it for a bit?

Port Smartsuite and the Notes Client to Linux couple that with Mozilla and you have a Linux workstation that is nearly as functional as an MS workstation for the average corporate user.

Why port SmartSuite? OpenOffice is already there. Why port the Notes client?
80% of functionality is available from the browser. 95% will be available in
the 6.1 timeframe. What are you missing? Client replication? How many KDE
laptops are out there?

Hell you already have the Server addition on Linux why not the client?

Do you really need an answer to that? I'm *sure* you understand the difference
in complexity when writing a back-end application with a console interface vs.
a full-fledged GUI. What are we talking? 2... maybe 3 times as much effort?

Why does Lotus always have to wait and wait instead of taking a chance?

But they *did* take a chance. With 3 UNIX clients already. And with give-away
consumer clients in Germany. And with Lotus Components. And with those Java
applications. And with ViP. And with Sametime, Discovery Server, K-Station,
Quickplace and Domino.Everywhere. Some of these were successes and some were
failures. But either way, every line of code was a chance.

Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum

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