Have things really improved in eight years?
by Volker Weber
Bruce has a cover of Group Computing Jan/Feb 2000 and says: "Things have certainly gotten better since Jim O'Donnell Published this story".
Have they really? In 2000:
- Lotusphere sold out in hours to an audience of 10,000++.
- There was a Lotusphere Europe.
- Lotus was still having developer conferences.
- Year after year Lotus was publishing ever increasing sales of new seats.
- Microsoft was competing with Exchange 5.5.
- There was no SharePoint.
- There was no collaboration on the Web, no free 6 GB mailboxes, no shared calendars, no Skype, no Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
- Lotus had yet to scare its customers with "The Future is J2EE".
Comments
In fairness, in 2000 we were in the middle of one of the biggest ever IT boom. Money was no object, etc. Investors would invest in *anything*. R5 had just came out, after a successful R4, 4.5 and 4.6 releases. The customer count had gone through the roof.
The market has changed over the last 7 years.. Notes has came a long way since R5, Domino even more so. Microsoft have released Sharepoint. Exchange has been tweaked, but not radically overhauled. And Lotus have finally started marketing Notes again, after a 5-6 year hiatus in Europe.
---* Bill
"Money was no object, etc. Investors would invest in *anything*."
That didn't really effect internal IBM/Lotus budgets however. Although it did have a big impact on the number of people moving from IBM/Lotus to Internet startups.
Also in 2000 Lotus Sametime was just about chat and web conferencing and there was no Lotus Sametime Unyte. There was no Lotus Connections nor Lotus Quickr. There was no Domino Web Access, no Lotus Notes SAP solutions, no Lotus Notes on USB, no Lotus Notes client for Linux nor Mac. Lotus Notes was still just a client for surfacing NSF based applications. There was no Lotus Forms, no Lotus Symphony, no Lotus Greenhouse, no WebSphere Portal Accelerators. Lotus had not announced Lotus Traveler. There was no "insert all the new things you'll be hearing about for the first time at LotuSphere" (and there are a few doozies!). There were no Lotusphere Comes To You events reaching tens of thousands of people in local markets all around the world. There were not dozens of Lotus blogs by both IBMers and the community. No OpenNTF, no TakingNotes Podcasts, no IdeaJam. No Lotus videos on YouTube. And the Boston Sox had not won the World Series... twice!
Just to have some fun :)
Sametime Unyte what's that? there was going to be Ladybug one of many failed attempts by Lotus to do hosted web conferencing. Telephony integration for Sametime was offered by Latitude. Sametime awareness existed in Notes also.
Lotus Notes SAP solutions - SAPLSX had existed for a few years already, integration was possible.
Lotus Notes on USB - USB, that's for joysticks right?
Lotus Notes was still just a client for surfacing NSF based applications - Notes also surfaced web apps, and offere portal that could contain NSF, Web based and Java Apps, even activex components on pages.
no Lotus Forms - It had been and gone
no Lotus Symphony - It had been and gone
no Lotus Greenhouse - Many other gardening books available
Lotusphere Comes To You events reaching tens of thousands of people in local markets all around the world - There were many marketing events, but they had a different name.
I believe OpenNTF was NotesOSS? It offered Lookout and was making Lotus look bad.
I think the best thing about now is no two lane highway.
To really answer this question though, the poll needs to be done again with the same folks.
There was Lotus Forms, a different one. And Notes VIP, and Lotus Components, and Lotus eSuite. And Domino.Action, Domino.Merchant and a few more of those .somethings. That is from the top of my head. Some of those things may have already been dead, or not yet.
You have been around 2000, Alan. Do you think things are better today?
@Carl
Ugh. not only was there a Notes Client for Mac, there was Notes Designer for Mac!
Well, in 2000 I recall my old employer paying a “consultant” an obscene amount of money to develop a “web-like” application in the new-fangled Lotus Notes 5. An application, which a colleague and I then had to completely re-develop so that it actually, you know, worked :o)
Bill alludes to this: it wasn’t all good seven years ago: there were a lot of jokers in the market.
I've been around since 1994 actually! Yes, I'm happy to offer the 2007/08 Lotus portfolio of capabilities (as mentioned in my first post) to our customers over what we had in Lotus 2000 anytime.
Alan, the question was not whether the portfolio today is better than in 1999/2000. It'd better be, given eight years of work. The question is, whether things are better for Lotus today than in 2000.
Yes, it is.
I don't have figures to back this up, but I believe that in 2000 Lotus lost market share to Microsoft, as they were doing that every year for quite a few years; and this year I've heard Ed say that they gained market share.
Think back to the headlines of 1999-2001...
Did the web browser really obsolete rich clients?
Think forward to the year 2014...
Did Google-Apps obsolete some rich clients? Or was their killer app a simple idea: on-line file storage. (embraced by home users to share files with friends, and embraced by corporate users to bypass the IT bureaucrats)
Volker - You are making quite an assumption when you chide Alan about not answering the right question. It is only your interpretation of the question. Bruce certainly doesn't say anything about whether he was referring to the portfolio or how things are "for Lotus". My guess is it wasn't either and he was saying how things were for us, the Lotus customers, which is partly a matter of the product quality (R5 was not the best, I'm sorry to say), focus on issues by the vendor (IBM was already starting to coast back then), marketing support (Does "I AM" ring a bell?). Of course, I don't know that this is the question Bruce was answering either, but it seems as likely as the one you suggest. - Ben
Ben, I did not mean to chide Alan. My question was if Lotus is better off today than 1999/2000.
Papows resigned effective Feb 1 , 2000 and Zollar came aboard. At the time, Lotus was still pretty much independent and Zollar was going to change that. It would take two years until Zollar would announce the future of Lotus to be J2EE. At the dawn of 2000 eSuite had just died, there was no dual highway, the focus was firmly on Domino. The craze was Raven, later Discovery Server and K-station, etc. When that was over, Lotus would go onto the dual highway, NextGen, later Workplace, relegating Notes to the cash cow quadrant.
Goyal often gets the credit for turning this around, by virtue of announcing Hannover. However, I prefer to concur with Carl's comment on Bruce's:
It was also down to a very small percentage of IBM/Lotus employees that were kind of putting their heads on the block by continuing to bang the Notes/Domino drum when the smart people looking for promotions were pushing the virtues of Workplace, I think we all know who we should be thankful for to in that regard.
Ed, Ken, Kevin come to mind. And Alan is certainly one of them as well. Still, I don't think Lotus is better off today than before the company went ballistic.
Volker, as you point out, the Lotus brand's position in the market is very much lower than it was in 2000. The issues around K-station and Workplace have taken their toll over the intervening 7 years. MS has been allowed to take market share, and this will not be easily recovered.
Something worth noting though is that back in 2000, there were far more players in the collaboration/groupware market - Groupwise was still a significant player, Fujitsu/ICL and others were developing groupware platforms - it wasn't a straight 2-way fight that it is now.
Therefore, are Lotus better off than they were in 2000? No they are not.
Are they in a better place to grow and to dominate the market than they were in 2000, possibly... The portfolio is more broad, the integration with other key IBM products (Portal etc.) closer, the adoption of open standards and web technologies keener and so on.
I think the outlook for Lotus today is as positive as it has been at any stage in the IBM era. i.e. the trend is upward, the buzz is back, and employees, partners and customers (I think) know where the brand is headed. In my opinion, the seeds have been sown for significant growth in 2008-2010...
Of course, in 2000, the Lotus market could support a magazine like Group Computing (and a second one, Lotus Advisor), both of which have now closed their in-print doors. What does that say about the Lotus market?
Who me? Bitter and sad? Not at all. But still, not sure how much of the above is Lotus, how much technology, and how much media -- in fact, it is probably the perfect-storm intersection of all three.
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