Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : IBM is doing a great job of marketing Lotus.

You know, IBM is doing a great job of marketing to everyone that already has the Notes. No question, hands down, as a Notes developer, admin, and decision maker, I feel well informed that R6 is here, it is powerful, and they have listened to the current user community's requests for changes. Woo Hoo.

But I think the bigger picture is missing here. The future of this product has become so unclear its like driving with my hi-beams at night through a wall of fog. IBM has shown that they don't even know what they will do with the product. Sure today it has support. Today, IBM is standing strong and loud screaming that Notes is here to stay. 10 months ago the story was completely different. So, what about 10 months from now.

If IBM is clearly on the fence, why would anyone analyzing this product as a solution, even consider making the move. The CIO justifying 6+ figures of investment isn't going to base that decision on the little ole techie that thinks Domino is the next best thing since sliced bread. When analyzing a direction and how it plays into the big corporate picture a CIO needs to be sure the solution will plug in well. Then invest in the appropriate resources (people, hardware, training, etc...). I mean the brief life of the DB2 back-end announcements sent shivers through the industry. It takes years to become a good RDBMS admin/developer. Oracle has a whole certification program. To think that a Notes admin/developer can simply jump over to DB2 without a problem either gives no credit to people who have spent years becoming expert RDBMS admins/developers or simplifies the heck out of DB2 capabilities. I mean, do you think Oracle would be a market leader if they announced one day "we will be moving away from the relational paradigm and into a document based data storage facility". Can you fathom what would happen if they said that. Why does IBM think it was OK to utter the reverse, even if it were for a short period of time. And then the whole "JSP is in, no out, no in....". Why are you announcing what you are "thinking about doing"? Who would invest money in new technology that has no clear direction.

People in this forum, the strongest proponents of Notes, have no clear idea of what is happening with the product. No matter how much IBM has reversed and firmed their position, people here view a different picture then IBM is attempting to paint. It really doesn't matter what the specific decision was. But constant reversal and contradiction is PR death.

But let's say Notes/IBM can recover from the information debacle of the past year. There is still a much larger, older problem looming here. Marketing and product placement (strategy). And I don't mean to say that IBM should have had a more timely announcement about the launch of R6. The list of announcements that did and are coming have nothing to do with the problem. The audience that would receive the information from ibm.com, lotus.com, computerworld.com, and any "road show", long knew R6 was coming. These announcements are only the fun hype surrounding a product that I have long ago bought into. These announcements will only serve IBM in getting those R4 people that never switched and the R5 people that are on the fringe of dumping the entire product for a slew of other, technical issues. The real marketing and product placement issues relate to each and every person we Notes developers have run into that asked, "WHAT IS NOTES?".

I am no MS fan and fully understand the superiority of many other technologies over MS products. But right, wrong, or indifferent, they win the marketing and product placement game hands down. I don't even care if they are painting the true product picture when they advertise/market. That is for us to decipher. Again right, wrong, or indifferent MS marketing works. Standing on a soap box screaming that they are monopolistic liars will only end with me and my soap box in one corner, while everyone else is reading their Outlook email that says Microsoft is a monopolistic liar. I don't know if I need their products, but they sure do a great job at making me think I might.

So why does MS marketing (and for that matter many other companies) work? For one thing, they don't cater to people that already have their products. They target the people that don't. Case in point, creating a series of utilities that will aid current Notes shops in identifying and analyzing their Notes apps for easy migration to exchange. Talk about a shot in the heart. If IBM's lack of clarity were not enough to push people away from Notes, MS's latest round of targeted marketing definitely will. And for those that do have MS products, you get bombed with advertising for their products you don't have.

Someone else made a comment in a recent post. "Notes is a cash cow for IBM". Its a cash cow in that there is plenty of money to be made off existing customers. Hands down, IBM is on track for marketing to its current Notes user base.

But the people that ask "what is Notes?", will continue to ask that question while they code VB/Exchange, VB/SQL, Java/Oracle, PowerBuilder/Sybase. Don't get me wrong, I am not comparing the capability of Oracle to Notes. I am simply talking to the reality of how companies are thinking. If they don't understand that Notes would provide a good RAD solution to that simple project tracking system, then they will build it in something they do know. And while I understand there is plenty of information about Notes on lotus.com and ibm.com, well, read on, I get to that.

Nathan Freeman in a recent post put a link to something he wrote in 2000. The concept revolved around spending money on educating the next generation of developers currently in school. How the heck do you think Apple continues to hang on when by all rights they should be long gone. Not because they are inventing anything new and great today. Its because they have ensured their future by placing the technology in the hands of students. The same students that when they leave school will look to the technology they have just learned.

Microsoft does the same thing by placing all the software on that next desktop you purchase. A trial of this, a limited version of that, and suddenly they have their fingers everywhere. And oh, we want to win the browser wars, let's just give it away and then make money off all the stuff the browser can access. And like it or not, their software becomes the software of choice. Then, suddenly you get a new CIO. And this person has never heard of Notes before or just thinks its another email system. So now I have an internal trouble tracking system I need to build. What a great app for Notes. But this new CIO has no idea and only has experience with every other major player. So who gets that job, Access, VB/SQL, Java/Oracle. Anything but Notes. Why? This is a CIO. This person should "know" that Notes is the best fit. That's the job of a CIO, isn't it? To just know. So let's say for a moment that these CIOs are not reading Fast Company or Fortune, they are reading ibm.com's "software" page. Do you think anything on that page will get the CIO from Point A (needing a project management app) to Point B (Notes is a good fit). I don't think so.

Notes is losing ground. There is no question about it. To the posts in this forum that talked about the "4 of the 10 top companies in my area" using Notes, and this big name company and that big name company using Notes, I agree, there are some great companies still using Notes. But I would ask that you think outside that box. Those great companies that are using Notes can easily be kept happy with successful projects and a strong commitment to the technology from IBM (note to IBM: don't announce anything until everyone inside is on board). People need to start thinking about the companies that are NOT using Notes.

Ask yourself, how did Microsoft gain so much ground with exchange when Notes was a far superior product. The day should have never come when it became unclear who had more seats, Notes or Exchange. Or who grew more year over year. Notes is a great product. And with poor to nonexistent marketing, the product sold itself. Via consultants and developers and techies. But Notes had no competition. Once the big guns "claimed" to have a Notes killer, Lotus (and now IBM) should have dove into the marketing arena with a vengeance. Sure, Lotus responded to Microsoft's claims. So Lotus did a great job at turning marketing into a political campaign. The competitor makes a claim and we went on the defensive. I don't think that is considered marketing.

Some people relate this to Lotus 123 vs. MS Excel. I don't fully agree. With MS Excel, it was a different story. The product was equally as powerful as Lotus 123. So why not switch to a "suite" oriented setup. In that scenario, if Lotus had the proper strategy, they still would have lost a certain amount of ground to Excel (but it should not have been the death of 123 as it was). The single greatest problem with Notes integration into mainstream corporate America is strategy.

Notes is a strange product. Half the developers when pressed by executive management, can not produce a clear definition of what it is and how it fits into the infrastructure picture. It does not fit into any current software paradigm. Its email, its an application development environment, its a web server, its an intranet server, heck its got so many personalities it should be under psychiatric care :-) Seriously, with all that under one hood, it can not be marketed in any traditional fashion.

Ed made mention in a previous post that no other company does product advertising they do technology or solution advertising, or something to that affect. This is nothing personal against Ed, I am just talking to the business here, but if IBM tries to market the same way Oracle does, then we are all in very big trouble. We all know what Oracle is. They don't need to spend money telling us they are RDBMS (plus).

There are some important things happening in the decision process to move from Notes to Exchange. Do you really think that the decision was an application based decision. No way. That decision was made by corporate email because that is how Notes is thought of. And the apps that ran on the old Notes servers? Well, we can just switch those to Access or exchange. Hey, I know the feature loss that will occur when that happens. You know the feature loss that will happen. But if the decision maker has no understanding of the product, then they won't know the feature loss until the feature is lost.

Sure that's an over simplification, but it does represent a general problem. At many levels (technical, enterprise analysis, etc...), there is no understanding of this product.

I've read other posts that the future of Notes (or Domino - basically the entire product) is tied to specific technology. And without it Notes or Domino is a goner. I don't think its that black and white. While the type of technology compatibility is important (ex. if Notes turned its back on Java that would be a killer), I truly believe that the future of Notes is tied to clear direction and strong marketing. MS shows us that the technology is only a small portion of the picture. Its not even half the battle. IBM needs to learn how to sell ice to an Eskimo.

So, how can it be fixed. Well definitely not from the rhetoric I just spewed. But whatever it is has to be a complete 180 from what is happening today. You can't compete side by side with other products. That has never worked for Notes. The fact that you keep doing it says 1 of 2 things, no lessons have been learned or this product is purely a cash cow from your current users as it slowly dies and once the loss of profitability occurs, the product will be retired. You need to start over, from scratch. All the old concepts have to go out the window. Compare anything new you conceive to everything you have ever done. If it sounds close to something once tried, throw the idea away. And sadly, the ability to do that usually can not happen from the same people that created the old concepts. Again, not personal against anyone specific at IBM.

Let me finish by saying, this was just a rant. I don't expect mountains to be moved by it. I am simply participating in a forum discussion. There are no personal attacks here. I respect everyone's opinion. If it sounds like I had shown disrespect for any posting I referred to or I addressed the general public inappropriately, it is not how it was meant. Mastering tone in the written word is an art in itself, which as a developer of computer systems, I freely admit to not having.

Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum

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