Notes and Domino obsolete?
Uh oh. I can hear the gnashing of teeth from here.
In the future, if nothing else changes, I personally believe IBM Lotus Notes and Domino will be irrelevant at best, assuming that the products continue to exist. In my view, the most likely scenario is that IBM Lotus will merely try to hang on to its shrinking customer base through a never ending stream of minor point releases that change virtually nothing but that may obscure for a time the fact that the solution is no longer economically viable…
My advice to Lotus Notes and Domino professionals is to start learning new skills. Technology changes. Get used to it.
Read more: DominoPower: Why Ron Herardian thinks Notes and Domino are obsolete.
Posted at 07:53 PDT on 15 Aug 2008 | Categories:
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lotus notes domino
dominopower (29 comments)
Every comment he's made on my blog, in the press, and in the Partner Forum in the last few years has been of this gloom and doom type. There's a good reason that he is not an active part of the Lotus community, and as an outsider, he just sounds sour.
Hate to make it personal, but there's no other way to analyze this.
I love how he says that he declared file sharing mail dead in 1995. That's funny, I was at cc:Mail Interchange 1993 where Lotus announced LCS 4.0, a client/server architecture based on Notes 4.0. They made it pretty clear then that file sharing e-mail was dead, and it just took another four years for the market transition to happen (on both the MS Exchange side, released in 1996 and the Notes side as well).
Surprised DominoPower ran this.
Really? DominoPower is a periodical like any other: needs to pull those readers in I suppose!
I must confess, I‘d not heard of either Ron or GSS before reading this article. I think there are some valid comments re SaaS, but that’s about it.
Indeed that would return Lotus to old glory, if we can do it.
Is DB2 the road to it? unlikely. Was workplace? Perhaps.
Just my thoughts, and some countries inititaives that failed to see the light of day.
"the most likely scenario is that IBM Lotus will merely try to hang on to its shrinking customer base through a never ending stream of minor point releases that change virtually nothing"
It is easy to point out how that is incorrect by showing product plans for the Notes client, iNotes, Traveller, Domino Admin, Domino App Dev, Notes App Dev, Foundations, etc.
He's allow to have an opinion, but his facts are simply wrong.
Ron says: "There are many reasons why Lotus Notes and Domino is -- or once was -- an excellent choice (security for example) but the bottom line business issue is cost."
No, the bottom line business issue is cost/BENEFIT. If everyone was selling apples of the exact same size and quality, THEN cost is the only issue. However, the value proposition of Notes/Domino is certainly not identical to what MS or Sun or anyone else are offering, so now you have to compare apples to oranges and THAT is necessarily more complicated.
The stuff that Notes is excellent at doing just cannot be done on anything else. Don't mention Sharepoint please!!!
Bad form of Herardian to mask his conflict. Mine is clear. We make solutions for Notes.
And there you have it, in a nutshell. There is very little “real” journalism out there nowadays, especially in the world of IT. As John de Giorgio points out, Herardian does his article—and of course, his readers—a gross injustice in concealing his bias.
With regards DominoPower, I can only assume they’re “doing a searchdomino” in publishing this particular piece, and given past performance I imagine (hope!) that this is a one-off, because the “disclaimer” at the beginning is pretty weak.
It is good to have such stories from time to time because you will find them in the real world too. Everyone has been invited to discuss and respond. They sometimes are the background of a migration (not to Sun though) and it is good to read the arguments and respond accordingly. It is good to be prepared because there are millions of Ron Herardians out there.
I personally find it a pity that the Domino community is so hostile against other opinions and technologies.
Meanwhile, I'll blog this whole thing later today... though Ron's 15 minutes for the year are probably already expired.
2. Ron Herardian - ...yawn... and his company has just released a bunch of migration tools... zzzzzzzzz
Either way, it's the second time in two weeks (ping me offline if you want to know about the other one) and I'm thinking I need a bit of a break.
Scale? No one will ever know.
Bu the idea behind it was a valid one, to assist Domino in scaling via some other methodology.
I liken it to the alternative-fuel people, most of it is hogwash but someone will find it.
http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200710/00002033003.html
But it's written as a back-handed compliment. If you read through it, it's evident Ron doesn't get out much, reads newspapers or surf the net n stuff. Does he live in a remote cabin or something ? Either way, once someone starts writing such un-informed tripe it's just white-noise and should receive no further attention...
I think Ron needs to reconsider his position.
Domino is back.... or maybe it was never dead at all.
Good marketing if you ask me.
He's differentiating that with client/server, which is where he lumps in Notes/Domino and Exchange/Outlook. In the scope of our discussion, Lotus cc:Mail is the product example he's talking about.
I think many people would look at LAN based as contrasted with meaning not on the local network, e.g. a hosted SaaS solution.
Ron doesn't see it that way and therefore claims he was correct originally in being the one to proclaim that LAN based mail was dead in 1995, replaced with client/server.
Likewise he also believes Domino is dead because in his view IBM has no SaaS strategy for Domino, only WebSphere.