IBM Challenges Microsoft With an Ad Campaign

Rytis writes "IBM is about to spend $300 Million dollars on a campaign to win customers and to convert them from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes and Domino under Linux. IBM is also said to offer resellers a bounty of $20,000 for switching customers to its Linux-based e-mail programs from Microsoft server software. It seems that the concurrence Microsoft Corp. is facing is getting tighter and tighter. The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."

IBM, anymore trustworthy in this?

Sometimes I'm not sure what IBM is thinking. I don't "get" this campaign. IBM is spending $300M on a campaign to convince customers to switch from MS' propietary to their propietary message product? Wow!

From the Seattle PI article:

"People are confused, and that's why we are going into that campaign," Harreld, who also took control of marketing in January, said in an interview at IBM's Armonk, N.Y., headquarters. "We're really trying to get at this problem."

I'm not sure I see this as a clarifying move. I see it only as another product offering. I've used Lotus Notes and worked with it many times. It has lots of interesting features, but I found it obtuse and overloaded at least in the context of an e-mail/calendaring product... the business world probably doesn't need or care about yet another e-mail.

And, IBM is couching this under the comforting and (maybe) enticing siren of Linux and open systems? Wow! A paragraph from the Bloomberg article:

"A growing number of organizations are interested in moving away from closed, proprietary technology platforms in favor of an open computing model," said Michael Loria, Director of Worldwide Channels, IBM Software Group. "As one of the fastest growing operating systems in the world, Linux is emerging as a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows as an email and collaboration platform," he added.

I find this invitation disingenuous, dishonest, and ethically bankrupt at best. I'm a huge fan of Linux, and hope for its eventual place in the business world (which I would submit it already has... except we all still have to whisper about it), but I think IBM is miscalculating on this.

And even if they are dead on in their marketing campaign, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable they piggyback so strongly on Linux. I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?

I've worked with IBM throughout the years and my experience has been they are not too much different than Microsoft in their commitment to Unix platforms, i.e., it's a pill they'll swallow or pretend to swallow if it makes them look willing to play in the Open Source community.

IBM has diverted Unix technology before (anyone played with AIX before???), I fear they're using it today for personal (corporate) gain. I know corporation's responsibilities are to be as profitable as possible, but this smacks of lip service.

Re:IBM, anymore trustworthy in this?

And even if they are dead on in their marketing campaign, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable they piggyback so strongly on Linux. I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?

Where have you been? If it was not for IBM sco would be suing other linux users for a scosource license. see: groklaw.org

They have only contributed to 94 linux projects... you can see the very small list here:http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/l inux/projects.jsp

For email/calendaring, Exchange is easier.

Lotus Notes is an incredible platform. It does just about everything.

Unfortunately, most companies just want something that will handle the email and calendaring with Outlook.

Instead of putting $300 million into this stupid ad campaign, spend $250 million on a basic corporate email server that handles email and calendaring that works with Outlook (or clone the Outlook ... look). Then spend $50 million on getting the word out.

Start small and build up. Lotus Notes is anything but small.

Re:For email/calendaring, Exchange is easier.

What you're missing is that Lotus Notes works with Outlook.

Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook.

http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/ product1.nsf/wdocs/accessmsoutlookhome [ibm.com]

Keep the Outlook client, but use Domino as the back end, and you can scale up to hundreds of thousands of users on a single server, rather than crapping out at 3000 or so.

(Disclaimer: I work for IBM. Opinions mine, not IBM's.)

Re:IBM, anymore trustworthy in this?

The other thing to remember here is that Lotus Domino and the other IBM business offerings do run on Linux. So it is on an open platform. As much as I love Pine for e-mail, business users (especially management) is going to want something with more features. So while yes, you are using a proprietary solution, you're using one made by a company embracing open standards instead a proprietary solution on a proprietary platform produced by an almost exclusively proprietary company.

Re:IBM, anymore trustworthy in this?

Sometimes I'm not sure what IBM is thinking. I don't "get" this campaign. IBM is spending $300M on a campaign to convince customers to switch from MS' propietary to their propietary message product?

Umm. What do you expect? They have a product. They're advertising it. This is shocking?

I find this invitation disingenuous, dishonest, and ethically bankrupt at best.

As far as proprietary is concerned, as far as I can see it plays nice with standards where standards exist for the things it does. It does not extend standards in a noncompatible way either. This seems reasonable for a proprietary program. I think it's clear that IBM is selling Domino, so I don't see what your beef is.

overloaded at least in the context of an e-mail/calendaring product..

Bingo. The problem is that it has always been more than email and calendar; trying to position it as a competitor to Exchange has only made the product confusing. The situation has only become more confusing as new product categories evolve that conver part of what Notes does, for example content management. Notes just isn't a clean fit into any of the product categories people are accustomed to.

Re:IBM, anymore trustworthy in this?

I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?

I'm not sure the exact details of IBM's direct support of Linux, but they develop tools for it and on it. The ServeRAID Manager CD and other bootable tools run on Linux kernels, and the latest ServeRAID-8i adapter runs Linux onboard as well. The DSA tools will run on Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell server editions. Apparently an entire IBM division is considering switching to Linux [slashdot.org]. And of course, as mentioned in the article, their commercial software offerings run on Linux.

There are various ways of supporting things. Giving money is one way, and actually using and promoting the use of them is another.

Domino/Notes

Being a former Domino/Notes admin, I can honestly say that the system sucks. It's counter-intuitive, poorly documented, slow and overly complex.

Unless you have a killer-app that only runs under domino, I'd stay away from it.

Re:Domino/Notes

As a current user of Lotus Notes (it's up now on my other monitor), I have to agree that it sucks. There are so many features - hundreds and hundreds of them. What do any of them do? Why do I need them? And with all those features, why do basic things like having emails show up in my inbox when I receive them not work?* Why is it so hard to copy and paste things? Why is are the databases so slow and prone to crash?

I've never used Outlook, so I cannot really compare. I just know that there has to be something better than Lotus Notes.

*(If you are actively doing something in Lotus Notes when an email arrives, such as clicking somewhere - even on the inbox refresh button - then you get the audible alert and the "You have new mail" notice on the status bar. However, you don't actually get the email, and the refresh button does not work. I have only found success by putting it to the side and waiting for the next auto refresh, usually a few minutes later. This is with Lotus Notes 6.5.3, the latest version I'm allowed to use.)

Re:how to refresh the Notes inbox

Or hit F9. (F5 won't refresh like you expect, it'll actually lock you out.)

Good - but to Notes?

Hmmm. Last time I used Lotus, I thought, arrgh, what a POS. Clunky clients, flaky servers. Why are they pushing that, and not investing 1% of that 300 million in developing/extending some server based on Groupware.
Exchange is good for what it does, and users scream loudest when their email goes down. So I expect companies will be loath to change their entire messaging system. Especially to Notes.

Re:Good - but to Notes?

Notes is, by a wide margin, the worst email client I've ever used. The most normal and hum-drum activities in other email clients are either impossible in Notes (sorting email by subject line, for example), or grossly complicated and unreliable (setting up a forwarding rule, for example-- then watch it continue to run for hours after you delete the rule!)

I'm working at an IBM shop right now, meaning that we use Notes for email, and everybody hates it. The users hate it because it's difficult to use. The network administrator hates it because it's a pain in the ass to do simple tasks like, for example, changing a user's name. The accounting department hates it because it's expensive.

And yes, this is where the Notes supporters will chime in to remind me that Notes is more than just an email client-- it's also a network-aware database host ala Access. Except there's two major problems with this:
1) IBM advertises that Notes is an email client.
2) It's a crappy DB host also.

Look, supporting Linux is one thing, but nobody should be supporting Notes. If the free market worked at all in the computing industry, this program would have died out years ago because it's too crappy for anybody to purchase. If you want to support Linux, do it in such a way that you're not also supporting a horrible piece of software like Notes.

As an aside, why do all groupware products suck? Groupwise sucks. Domino/Notes sucks. Exchange/Outlook sucks. Why doesn't someone like Adobe create a groupware product to completely blow these suckers away?

Re:Good - but to Notes?

As an aside, why do all groupware products suck? Groupwise sucks. Domino/Notes sucks. Exchange/Outlook sucks.

Maybe because software in and of itself has become a "necessary" part of business in industries that as recently as 10 years ago didn't have to rely on software.

Much of the chatter encouraged by such communication systems is just background noise and a lot of corporate activity is just busywork. For really important projects (I mean building a bridge, process plant or skyscraper) you don't want to rely on being able to reach one critical person via email or groupware. You use the phone for that.

Have the april fools started yet?

It's 12:05AM. Last year *every single story* for about 24 hours was a lame joke.. how am I to believe this one?

Probably will avoid slashdot for about 36 hours just in case.

Lotus Notes?

Whoa, IBM wants people to switch from the at-least-ok proprietary MS solution to their own we-have-the-worst-software-in-the-world, a-thousand-interface-designers-sacrified-every-day , lotus-notes-making-your-brain-melt-since-1996, interface-standards-are-not-for-us-goddamit Lotus Fucking Notes?

Woohoo, fucking win, that's not even being between a rock and a hard place, that's being in an erupting volcano and seeing a frigging Chicxulub-class asteroid falling on you (that'd be a 10km diameter asteroid, 6mi for our metrically challenged american friends).

And don't listen to anyone telling you that Notes is great and that it rocks your socks, it's been proven that only Notes developers can utter praises for that piece of donkey poo, they're merely trying to keep their jobs.

Lotus notes, eh?

Though i have no first hand experience in this, i have it on good autority from my friends who do corporate server installations for both lotus notes and exchange, that lotus notes is not particularly friendly or... whats the word... good. but like i said i have never installed either package.

Dead On Arrival

As soon as anyone actually tries to use Notes, the evaluation will be over.

Where art thou, editors...

It seems that the concurrence Microsoft Corp. is facing is getting tighter and tighter. The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."

Concurrence?

concurrence [reference.com] Pronunciation Key (kn-kûrns, -kr-)
n.
Agreement in opinion.
Cooperation, as of agents, circumstances, or events.
Simultaneous occurrence; coincidence.

I imagine that competition was meant. You don't talk about "tight concurrence"--"tight" is usually used in conjunction with "competition" to describe particularly a particularly fierce and aggressive competitive environment. Of course, the sentence which immediately follows is also a fragment, adding grammatical insult to the vocabulary injury.

I know it's hard to moderate the thousands of user submitted articles we get here, but these are concepts taught in English classes at the elementary school level.

This is a damn good idea

Salesmen will push what they make the most money on, period.

We sold Apples to folks who wanted PCs cause we'd make $100 spiff on a Mac box but 5% of the profit off the sale with PCs. Considering stuff was sold at or near or sometimes under cost, it was flog the extended warranty, sell Macs or starve. Got good at selling Macs....

Our Dell rep came in with squishy toys wondering with his rah rah speech why we weren't selling all Dells, to which we said sorry pal, we make nothing off selling a Dell, show us the money and we'll flog as many as you can make.

This was lost on him, he was trying to sell Dell on its technical merits... what the hell did the other salespeople care, they knew nothing about computers, and their customers wanted the "Color TV" one where the "hard drive" lay flat so you could put the "TV" on it.

I hear Lotus Notes blows.

Maybe it would make more sense for IBM to build an exchange replacement that is actually good, and then advertise the hell out of it? I think if they spend a lot of money on calling peoples' attention to Notes, it will just backfire.

Some people would pay to get away from exchange

Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute). I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding. The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues). That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server. And yes, Exchange CAN handle also shared calendar data etc. but so can IMAP and that was wat a lot of customers used it for while Exchange had performance problems when a secretary opened more than 3 executive calendars at the same time.

Fun With Lotus Notes

Oops, guess I forgot the tag in the subject line. Notes is an intriguing concept of storing information in hierarchical "documents" but a number of things make it difficult to use. I spent months at my last company converting Lotus Notes applications that someone had written into an Oracle database with a web front end. One thing interesting though about Notes, when we sent an e-mail to Australia from the U.S. asking for a read receipt, the receipt gladly told us that our message "was read tomorrow".

For a better world, we should all do it!

Give up Exchange Server for Notes!

Give up Sex for Video Games

Give up Kobe Beef for Bean Sprouts

Give up SUVs for Hybrids

Give up TV for a walk in the park.

Give up music for the sound of waves on the beach

Give up Logic for Scientology

You too can have an episode of South Park devoted to your madness!

Notes? Wah?

Having worked for IBM in the past and having been forced to use Notes as my desktop email client, it's difficult for me to comprehend why they'd make it the centerpiece of their assault on Microsoft. Powerful, yes, but also terrible to use as an end-user.

Notes is great for _some_ things

As an email/calendar/contacts application, it's pretty weak.

If you are doing workflow-enabled applications, and you have good Notes developers, it's a damn good product and you'll find that you can roll out apps very quickly (detractors, please note that I said you need good developers).

Understand the Penguin

> The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had.

It isn't so much that the Penguin has powerful friends, but that Microsoft has powerful enemies. How about a Warcraft scenario: Bill in Borg weeping as he runs through the swamp, pursued by big war trolls and a very angry penguin!

As a daily user of Lotus Notes

All I can say is.. STAY AWAY!!

Outlook may be pretty evil, what with sending RTF e-mails.. But then.. so does Lotus Notes! It manages to 'retain' formatting from other applications when copy-pasting when it's entirely inappropriate, even (like, pasting some text from a webpage, bam! different font). It doesn't download attachments when you get your mail, but when you do download it, it doesn't add it to its 'local mail database', but let's you save it somewhere. Get the attachment from e-mail again because you deleted it from your filesystem, you have to download again. Calendering, sure, nice. But buggy as hell. Rescheduling usually doesn't work, you can read invites from Outlook users, but (sometimes) not accept them, or when you accept them, they don't get notified. "Replicating" databases takes ages, and doesn't in fact allow you to work offline. The client isn't noticibly multithreaded, you have to wait for a download to finish before being able to do something else. The client is a huge bloated binary, and it writes huge ass 'database' files to your disk. When you kill the client (which you often have to do as some actions lock the client up completely, though you'd like to cancel them), you have to log off and login again to restart it. It comes with transparant encrypted connections to its server - but it's not on by default. There is no clear way to mark a message unread!! I had to endure a few weeks of "tip of the day" messages to find out the INSERT button marks messages read/unread. No context menu option for that. Making a todo note? Not by using a menu option in the To-Do part of your screen, but you have to focuse the ToDo canvas, and then go to the client's main menu and select "create Todo". It uses proprietary mail protocols that don't add the usual RFC 2822 headers, and RFC 2822 headers from internet mail are really hard to get at. It makes you confirm unicode (utf-8) encoding for a message TWICE, even though it selects it by default when you type an accented character. It's slow and unresponsive. Did I mention the address books don't work properly? And no auto-complete?

This might all be fixed in later and greater versions (i have no idea what version I'm on now, I think 6.5 or something).. But compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend!

Yeah. Compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend.. Just imagine how crappy Lotus Notes must be, for that comparison to hold!

Hmm

How many people could $300 million employ?

Hmm...

April Fool's day a few hours early?

This has to be an April Fool's day joke...

Incredible

"A growing number of organizations are interested in moving away from closed, proprietary technology platforms in favor of an open computing model," said Michael Loria, Director of Worldwide Channels, IBM Software Group. "As one of the fastest growing operating systems in the world, Linux is emerging as a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows as an email and collaboration platform," he added.

Wow! IBM is open sourcing Lotus Notes and Domino? They really believe in the Open Source development model! That's an absolutely amazing mov...

Oh, what's that? The actual mail product they're selling is every bit as proprietary as exchange?

Gotta love the marketing department that can actually say the above quote with a straight face while being so hypocritical at the same time.

It's because IBM are floundering.

They're reeling from a monumental loss. (Chances are that I'm totally wrong, but being an armchair consipiracy theorist, this thought works out. Keep reading.)

IBM sold off the ThinkPad and ThinkCentre division to concentrate on other things. Chip manufacturing? A major issue to Apple was the availability of the IBM PowerPC G5 chip, with the expanded feature set that Apple so desperately wanted. It just didn't happen fast enough, early enough, because IBM couldn't keep up with the production. IBM also failed to produce a G5 chip that would function adequately in a PowerBook environment.

Enter Intel.

1. The PowerPC G5 is released. The Apple crowd adores it.
2. The PowerPC G5 is realized to be an expensive system.
3. IBM fails to produce chips fast enough, with a rich enough featureset.
4. Apple, now strained after offering the G4 and the G5 way beyond the timeframe that of the G3 and the G4 overlap now begin to cry, having been unable to transition out the G4, and enter the G5 generation with the advent of the portable G5 (PowerBook, iBook).
5. IBM makes room to step up production. Sells ThinkPad and ThinkCentre to Lenovo. This is a huge gamble.
6. Apple switches to the Intel chip, a not-so-difficult proposition for them, since OS X - the crown software jewel of the Apple empire - ran on x86 hardware since it's inception.
7. Magically, with Apple out of the way, IBM is now available to supply Microsoft and Sony with PowerPC chips for use in the next revision of their game console systems (360, PS3). Albeit, IBM producing the PowerPC core is still sluggish, as evident by the rampant 'supply shortages' responsible for the slip in 360 delivery. (I'm not convinced that this is the case, though. I think Microsoft just has us by the short-and-curlies.)
8. ???
9. Apple: Profit! IBM: None!

So now they have to try to make it up.

No way

I work for IBM and use Notes every single friggin day, all friggin day. Overly complex and bloated is an understatement. It's absolute crap. $300 million seems like enough to start from scratch and create something decent. If I didn't have to use it, I never would..

Competition

It seems that the concurrence Microsoft Corp. is facing[...]

Competition, the word you're looking for is competition. It's a common false friend [wikipedia.org] for many languages.

Anyway, it should also be noted that there is no Lotus Notes client for Linux (although the Windows version supposedly runs in Wine), so I'm assuming the campaign will be all about switching the servers.

This is one subject where cursing is appropriate..

Lotus is the WORST FUCKING PIECE of software I have EVER used.

Period.

Bar NONE.

End of comment

Why Domino?

I imagine many Slashdotters will have little idea what Lotus Domino does that anyone would care about. The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate. So, for example, you can synch some subtree dealing with a topic you're interested in to your laptop, work with and edit it offline while (say) flying from Sydney to New York, and then resynch when you're next online. This is definitely useful, non-trivial functionality.

Domino does a bunch of other stuff but the offline/remerge functionality is the fundamentally cool thing it does that other products don't do. As, say, an email client and calendar, Domino is a pretty horrible.

I used Lotus Notes for several years while working for a big consulting firm. It was one of the worst designed, ugliest programs ever. It had groundbreaking functionality (see above) but even then it was easy to imagine something better, easier to use, and easier to administer.

Domino can still do some very useful things (again, see above) Exchange can't do, or does very poorly (indeed Exchange is worse than either IMAP or POP at dealing with offline clients -- and Notes is substantially better). It seems to me that there ought to be web-based tools that do everything EXCEPT the offline component far better than Domino or Exchange do, and more cheaply and simply, but I don't think Domino has a significant competitor in terms of its offline functionality (more's the pity).

The estimated TCO for a laptop PC back in 1997 was somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. The estimated TCO for a single Lotus Notes client was $9,000 -- Domino's functionality is great, but it ain't cheap. This would be of academic interest if Lotus Domino had improved substantially in usability or reliability in the nine years since, but by all accounts it is basically the same.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

"The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."

Please. IBM is OK for Linux in general, but Lotus Notes is the biggest piece of shit ever. All the people INSIDE of IBM hate it, let alone anyone else.

I hate Microsoft, but please, please ... use Exchange instead. Hell, use ANYTHING else.

Let's hope Mozilla helps...

When they really get their mail / calendar project going, Microsoft can kiss their Outlook customers goodbye.

From a guy who support Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes is cool, but it can be a pain.

It would kind of interesting to see Notes take off again... Basically you can use it like outlook and then combine MS access in it for custom databases. However, somethings are still a big pain that make Outlook look good. (no pun intended)

If you need just email, setup an imap and use Thunderbird for your client.
If you just need email and calendering then Outlook might be what you want (or maybe Groupwise if you are old school).
If you need email, calenders, custom database development tied into your email, plus tons of other stuff... Then Notes is your program. Hey they even have a OS X client that is way better than MS's Entourage.

OpenMail

If only HP had not caved to the MS pressure and ditched OpenMail. OpenMail was sweet. It could scale way beyond Exchange while providing all of the same features.

I am so sick of hearing about Notes sucking

Lets get a few things straight given that I actually KNOW THE F'ing products involved:

1. Notes has an odd UI with some challenges, we agree on that. Of course, that's because it was DESIGNED TO BE CROSS PLATFORM. In fact, the next rev includes a LINUX CLIENT.

2. Notes is VERY STABLE. I am personally aware of a major financial firm where 12,000 users are doing mail, calendaring, I.M., discussions, and workflow applications with the support of less than 15 people. They have had no outages. They have had no works.

3. Notes is inherently secure. It was doing public/private key encryption from day 1, back in the late 80's and is still doing so. It even supports PKI plug ins. Apparently, it was the only one because nobody else ever made any.

4. The notes CLIENT is inherently secure. It use execution control lists and design elements are signed. There are not worms or trojans that use Notes to replicate because THEY CAN'T.

5. Notes is OPEN. Yes, it uses a proprietary storage and transport format, but it also FULLY SUPPORTS XML for every design and and data element. It also includes Java (w/ IIOP and CORBA as well) object models, COM object models, and a published XML schema. It FULLY SUPPORTS MIME, SNMP, SMTP, LDAP (as client or server), NTP, HTTP, SSL, DIIOP, WEBDAV, WEB SERVICES (as client or server), ODBC.

6. Notes is PROGRAMABLE. Its objects are openly accessable and it includes full support for JAVA, Javascript, and its own Lotusscript and formula language.

7. Domino (the server) is MULTI-OS cross platform. It runs EQUALLY WELL on Linux, AIX, Solaris (in the past, and soon again) iSeries (OS400). I even know of one web accessible server running on Linux on XBOX! (no, I'm not going to /. it by linking it here).

8. Notes owns roughly 50% of the corporate mail and calendaring marketing. No, not in small business or home use, but in major corporations.

9. Notes & Domino are backward compatible. No rip and replace upgrades. EVER. I can take a version 8 beta client and open a version 2 application (that I have) and it will WORK. Now. It is cheaper to upgrade to Domino 7 from Exchange 5.5 than to upgrade to Exchange 2000 or 2003 from the Exchange 5.5.

---
So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general /.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?

April fools

The numbers quoted in dollars attached to the item seem ludicrous. I call April fools.

Anyway, anyone recognised the british medical journal gag this year. It's a "news" story about MoDwD or ,"motivational dificiency disorder", which apparently affects 1/5 Australians.

Total bullsh*t. April 1st as it should be.

even Outlook is better than Notes

I never thought I would become a Microsoft Outlook advocate, but after using Lotus Notes at work for the past two years, I bought a copy of Outlook and installed the Outlook Notes Connector [microsoft.com] just to avoid Lotus Notes.

The Lotus Notes client provides such a poor user experience. Just to name the most obvious problems: the menus are substantially different from other applications, preferences are hidden several levels deep in weird places, the toolbar buttons and the bookmarks sidebar are pointless, copy and paste doesn't work properly for things like addresses and names, the main window steals focus if you have X-Mouse/focus follows mouse enabled, HTML formatted messages aren't layed out correctly, and contact synchronization with my cell phone overwrites all numbers with the contact's work number. To make it worse IBM support doesn't want to know about any problems in the product and the online help isn't very helpful.

IBM needs to get its shit together before trying to push Notes. It would take a lot to make me consider it again.

The Irony is Unbearable

I've seen the commercial. It starts with just a few people lip-syncing to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" By the end they show hundreds, maybe thousands of people.

All singing "I'm Not Like Everybody Else"

I think if you look in the dictionary under irony, you see video of this commercial.

(And yes, I know that this comment reflects the common usage definition of irony rather than the dictionary definition. Give me a word that means the common usage definition of irony.)

Notes is horrible

WTF are they thinking?

Why I'm not on a Outlook/Exchange...

I've been running lotus notes for 5 years now, and the reason why we didn't switch to exchange?

Because to scale exchange to support the number of users we have, we'd need to deploy *FARMS* of intel boxes.

Oddly, it's been about two years since we had to reboot our iSeries (AS/400). Yeah, it's not as sexy as running 100s of windows or linux servers. As it's just a pair of clustered boxes in the corner, each running multiple LPARs that serve to provide redundancy for the other. But it just works, plain and simple.

My 2cents

Gotta chime in on this one. Lotus is by far the strongest collaborative platform available with products range from the Notes/Domino to Quickplace (hidden gem)and Sametime.

I work in a Domino shop (with good programmers) and its frankly amazing how far the platform can be pushed.
Think of it this way. Each Notes user is sitting there with a secure client for accessing any apps they need, whether they are native Domino, or plugged in to another system (SAP, Peoplesoft etc). The path forward will make this even easier.

The way ahead looks good with IBMs approach to making Notes a plug-in the their next-gen Eclipse-based platform. Existing Domino apps will run and the "client" will be fully extensible.
Sametime 7.5 looks killer.
I think one of IBMs major issues is marketing and personally am glad they are taking it seriously under Sarjit and Mike Rhodin's leadership. The "Gloves are off" campaign is a good start.

Product naming is another issue. Lotus's offering that competes with Sharepoint is called "Workplace Services Express". WTF does that mean? Who's ever heard of that product? (It's pretty neat by the way).
There's a good Ed Brill presentation that I'd suggest you see called "The Boss Loves Microsoft". Failing that you can at least download the slides (pdf 7.5mb). http://www.edbrill.com/storage.nsf/00d4669dcd9456a 386256f9a0056e956/42cf7602df53917586257108000261d8 !OpenDocument [edbrill.com]
You can watch the 2006 Lotusphere opening session webcast here in rm or wmv format http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/events/go vfor.nsf/wdocs/generalsessionwebcast/ [ibm.com]. The Sametime 7.5 and Hannover (Notes 8) parts are good.
My advice is to skip through the Jason Alexander into..it's pretty lame. Slides about Hannover and beyond are available here http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/ByDateNJ/0 317040CF37680FD8525711F0061CB5F/$FILE/Lotusphere%2 0INV101%20January%202006.pdf?OpenElement [lotus.com] Even if you hate Lotus, check some of the above out.
It pays to know your enemy ;-)

Did I sleep through something

Did I miss something here.....is IBM going to finally have a Linux Notes Client.....or does it just come with a copy of the eight page article from their Notes tech sight telling why it is impossible to port the client code to Linux and suggest you run it under Wine....

Lotus Notes + Domino sucks

We use this at work (we're IBM's bitch; if IBM says jump, we ask "how high?"; if IBM says "pay up!", we ask "how much?"). /.'s database doesn't have enough space for the complaints I have and my co-workers about Lotus Notes.

Some highlights from version 6.5:
* Copy/pasting text into a memo? Be prepared to wait 3 minutes or more (on a P4 2.53GHz) if it isn't unformatted plaintext, e.g. something as oh-so-fancy as HTML...

* Illogical menu design. Seriously, why are there different "preferences" choices beneath 2 different menu headings?

* Slow, slow, slow due to its sheer obesity. You've had Notes open all day and haven't used it in a while, and you're switching from the calendar to a plaintext memo? Wait a minute while Windows has to load Notes' fat ass out of the swapfile into RAM...

* Want to select multiple emails (say, to drag them into a folder or the trash)? No, you can't do it the usual, worldwide-accepted method of click item 1, hold down SHIFT, click last item in range. You must hold down SHIFT and click each fucking email.

* Want to setup a meeting in the calendar? Go ahead and choose "appointment" in the first combobox, then "meeting" once the creation form is open...

* People are encouraged to build apps using Lotus scripts. And invariably, the apps blow. Coincidence? Crappy developers? OK, both are probably true...

* And then there are the "You've got new mail" pop-up notices which occur sometimes when no email actually shows up in your inbox. Thank you Notes, for breaking my concentration on a project for the the notification of an email which doesn't exist!

Not a day at work goes by that I don't curse the giant steaming heap that is IBM's Lotus Notes. Seriously, the only nice thing I can say about Notes is that its scheduler does a good job of finding free time in peoples' schedules to setup meetings. That happens to work very well, and is quite a time-saver. But otherwise, Notes is fucking garbage, and while I haven't tried Exchange + Outbreak, I can't imagine it would be any worse. (Personally, I wish we'd switch over to a web-based groupware app and ditch these proprietary POS's that MSFT and IBM have for us, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.)

IBM's hardware rocks, but their software almost invariably is so godawful that it makes one wonder if they've implemented the "1,000 monkeys at keyboards will eventually write perfect software" theory. If so, the theory is failing badly... As much as MSFT's software tends to be putrid shit too, it's leaps-and-bounds better and more-consistent in behavior than anything I've seen IBM turn out. IBM realizes this, and that's why they're trying to ride the Linux wave -- IBM can't churn out worthwhile code, so they figure they'll let hobbyists do it for them...

Frankly, if IBM ports Notes to Linux and tries to get people to actually use it, I believe the brand image of Linux vendors (RedHat, etc.) will be cheapened. It will wind up being a negative impact on the viability of Linux as a desktop OS. Seriously, for those who've never used it, that is how bad Notes is; that's how incompetent IBM apparently is at writing solid, well-designed software...

No April Fool

And what's best, TFA is dated March 31st!

Notes calls at Helpdesk

I can say, I work on a helpdesk supporting around 1000 users or so. And the majority of our Knowledge Base articles we have are on how to handle various bizarre and weird things that go on in Notes. And a big chunk of calls, disproportionately large, are about Notes.

I support Notes, and I hate Notes. My co-workers hate Notes, and my users hate Notes. I don't know anything about the Server side, but I would not inflict Notes on anyone willingly ever. It's shit.

As to why - yes, everyone else has explained that it's due to Notes being a full-fledged database replication system. Which is nice. But sometimes people just want an email client.

Get a grip

Different apps work better for different people. I have recently started at a company that uses Notes system wide and I am quite impressed. I would have to guess that most people that are complaining don't use any of the forms function (yes, I have used MS Outlook's excuse) and don't have to document change controls and government compliance issues.

A simple database with an advanced calendar (I have worked with Outlook for years and could never trust a shared calendar) and an email client that won't blow up with a couple hundred emails a day.

Some things are different and I hate the keyboard shortcuts, but I have been on an XP machine that makes it thorugh a ten hour day without my email client throwing a wrench in the works.

Outlook may be prettier, Notes is nice for getting work done.

NEVER TRUST IBM!

As a former OS/2 user/developer I have a tip for you all. NEVER TRUST IBM! They do have excellent scientists, researchers, developers and technicians, sometimes even the marketing dept is pretty good, however the top level management cannot be trusted. I hope they don't manage to muckup the future of Linux. Apples 1984 commerical poking fun at them got it right.

Matthew