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Why Notes market share is slipping
IBM does not do anywhere near enough to explain why Notes is worth having. IBM also prices it far out of the realm of those who would actually have reason to use it.
IBM screwed up when it positioned Notes and Domino as a messaging platform (even though it does do it, and fairly well) -- because that allowed Microsoft to set the tone of the feature-debate.
I also have multiple friends who work or have worked in the IT support departments at IBM. They all tell me that IBM can't even configure Notes and Domino correctly to run smoothly, with a minimum of network traffic (problems with replication seem to be one of their largest headaches), or with any kind of speed.
I had to explain to one of them, last night, what precisely it is about Notes that makes me think that it's a wonderful thing. He said, "Thank you for explaining why it can be useful. Up until now, I thought it was a worthless POS."
It's slow, it's clunky, it's got a huge amount of cruft, it's difficult to properly administer, it's even more difficult to learn how to properly administer, it's even more difficult than that to learn how to properly initially set up, it's got some wonderful capabilities that are astoundingly poorly marketed, it's expensive, it's built on technically brilliant underpinnings with a whole slough of features that don't play well with themselves or others...
...and the only things I hear from my colleagues (both within and without IBM) when they have to deal with it is that it's an overwhelmingly negative experience. I've watched several companies go away from Notes, because the administrators they hired were unable to figure out how to get it to work. One of them was shocked to find out that he couldn't simply change the ID file and have the system work "properly" -- in his eyes, the new credential should have removed access to all resources under the old credential, including the old user's mailfile.
I appreciate that you're the one in charge of the many projects -- but we have 2.1+GHz multi-core processors. We shouldn't have to wait longer on average now to perform our tasks than we did ten years ago on 300MHz processors.
Why can't there be a project kicked off to make it easier to administer the client? Why can't a project be launched to figure out where the "common admin" is trying to go to perform a given operation, and then at the least create redirection linkages to take her to the correct spot? (By "common admin", I mean someone who's come from the depressingly overcommon client-server paradigm and has never been exposed to Notes or Domino before.)
Feedback response number WEBB7MWFX5 created by ~Helga Froluchekoden on 01/02/2009
Why Notes market share is slipping
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. . . . . . . . . . . . Why Notes market share is slipping (~Helga Froluche... 2.Jan.09) 
