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Let me start telling you that I have been in Lotus ( and later IBM ) since 14 years and my job is tech sales for Notes/Domino ( plus other stuff, but not relevant here); so I do know how you feel, I spent most of my working life fighting against Exchange and I understand your reasoning.
Having said that, there are a few things I'd like to point out.
"M$ have made it possible to use Outlook on Domino" - Not true. Us and them made it possible, DAMO is a Lotus product not a MS one. Some time ago we decided to let Outlook users take advantage of a more robust backend, that's the origin of DAMO. If MS alone wanted to have Outlook talk to a Domino backend, they'd still be figuring out how replication works :-)
"Search IBM's website..." - I am not telling this is correct, but usually we do not publicize on our website the winbacks. You may argue we should be more aggressive here and do like MS does and I could even personally agree, but the facts are these, and looking at websites to draw statistics out of the data you get is a bad exercise in math.
"make the Notes client free" _ I would love Ed Brill to comment on this :-) Do you think Outlook is free ? If yes, then kudos to the MS marketing machine, they washed people's brains very effectively. Outlook Express ( assuming it still exist ) is free, the "full Outlook" is not. There are several places where you can find the truth about MS licensing.
Also on this point, remember we're NOT in the consumer market, so having a free email client is not our job. We sell Notes to customers, and they are willing to pay a license to have a solution. For a company there's no difference in paying for the server and getting the client free.
"make it able to connect to an exchange server", well... if only they could understand something about security, replication, etc.... then we could think about this :-) Seriously, there is no business case for this. Even the connector they market, is explicitly declared as an interim solution for a migration and not a coexistence tool. There is really no point in having Notes talk to Exchange when the model is so different. How do you think we should deal with replication for example ?
"mobile phone vendors to supply Notes compatiblity with every release of new smartphone" - Isn't this the case already ? All the smartphones can sync mail & pim with Notes. BB does it, Nokia does it using Intellisync, and Windows mobile devices we take care of with Notes traveler.
"advertise more, sponsor the WorldCup football" - can't comment on this, you would need to talk to our marketing dept.
"sometimes it's the ordinary people that make administrators change/migrate" - I am very sorry but I strongly disagree with this statement. As I said I have been in this market for 14 + years and I have yet to see a migration ( regardless the direction ) happen for the endusers pressure. ALL those kind of decisions are taken at a higher level, trust me. We know this is not always a guarantee of a pure technical/business evaluation, there is politics involved, whatever you want.... but it never happens at the user level.
RoB
Feedback response number RBOO7BRF5X created by ~Elizabeth Desalitoden on 02/12/2008
some (long) thoughts
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. . . . . . some (long) thoughts (~Lily Cisfanate... 12.Feb.08) 
