Experience Lotus Notes
by Volker Weber
There is a very important rule: DO NOT SHOW THE PRODUCT.
Comments
They might get away with it if these features were unique. Waste of (web)space.
Just looked back through the vowe.net archives and found a screenshot of notesiscool.com. Saved for posterity. I sort of understand what IBM are doing - there's a fine line between capabilities and features, and sometimes it's better to focus on capabilities. However, IBM spent a lot of time and money trying to drag Notes away from the 'old, ugly and clunky' reputation - on the whole they did a good job, Notes 8 looked good and it got better through the 8.5.x releases. Notes' continued downfall is its reputation as ugly and the perception held by users.
When Notes 8 was first released I said to our Lotus UK Marketing Manager "can we have a campaign that shows the product? - it's eye-candy now, let's take advantage of that". She would have loved to have done it, but had a fraction of the budget necessary and it wasn't part of the plans. IBM spent money on addressing the biggest overall objection to Notes, and then wouldn't spend a bean on showing the world what they'd done. Sure, that's not the only factor in the history of Notes' decline, but you can safely point a finger at it.
I would say the biggest erosion in the user base began when IBM started "fixing" Notes.
I do like the Experience Lotus Notes page. Quite good for an IBM page and some of the links also show the product.
Indeed. I just could not find the product...
At the bottom of the page is a link to a "Learning and Video Gallery".
Click it and you get to the Learning Center in the Domino wiki with two big buttons: "Getting started"and "Video Gallery". Clicking "Video Gallery"brings you to a small list of videos.
The first one is: "How to analyze Notes and Domino Crash and Hang Data"
What a brilliant way to inspire confidence in a brand!
for the sarcasm detectionally challenged: Thats sarcasm!
Setting aside what I know, my take-away from that is that Notes is some kind of bog-standard email client.
Big whoop!
IBM need to shit or get off the pot: do they believe in Notes or not? Their wavering over Notes and whether to “sell” it in any way whatsoever is getting tedious (almost as bad as listening to Notes apologists ;-) )
“If you buy Lotus Domino because you like the email system, it's like buying a Porsche because you like the ashtray”
Taken from here...
http://www.cio.com.au/article/351964/boystown_updates_lotus_notes/?fp=4&fpid=15
and this not running 8.5.4 Social Edition which looks way better than Outlook 2010
@Luis -while it may be that the Social Edition "looks way better," how would the person looking at the Experience site know that? As vowe so eloquently put it: DO NOT SHOW THE PRODUCT.
What's probably going to happen is the same thing that seems to always happen: One person (or perhaps several) will create yet another web page that actually shows the product. Nowhere in the URL will be "lotus.com" or "ibm.com."
Social Edition 'looks way better'? Unless you've seen more, from the brief glimpses thus far, it looked like someone applied some dark new CSS to the mail template.
You're not going to sell Notes to business users based on a pretty inbox. You sell it to business by selling it as a platform. Yes, it does mail...but EVERYTHING does mail. You're getting a RAD development environment that's second to none, these cool free bundled apps (that don't exist, btw), web servers, IM, Traveler, etc.
In all honestly, I wrote this before viewing the link. I get so infuriated when I Notes marketing that I don't even bother anymore. At least there was a little, non-clickable, useless picture of an application in the main graphic. Then to proceeded to talk about how great it is at email and calendaring. Sigh....
