January 21, 2003
End of a tradition?
So here we are, the week before Lotusphere, and it hasn't happened. "It" is one of the strangest annual events I've been part of -- Microsoft's yearly attack on Domino. So far, the press release hasn't come...and I might have preferred to let this one die quietly, but it has been so much fun over the years.
I first took over Lotus' competitive marketing role as part of a job I was doing in mid-1999. Lotusphere 2000, therefore, was my first time as "point person" on responding to the annual sabre-rattling. In 2000, it was the bogus POP3 study which claimed that beyond 5000 users, Exchange 5.5 server could handle more POP3 users than Domino R5. Despite the fact that the report is still on MS' website, I've finally retired our response from lotus.com/compare. This report was so bogus that even Gartner issued a report criticizing MS' methods and findings. Let's face it, Exchange 5.5 was never a scalability monster (I never saw a server with more than 1000 users), and POP3 wasn't exactly its bread-and-butter (nor Domino R5's). This was a fun one to respond to since it so clearly made mincemeat of MS' credibility.
In 2001, we had just determined that MS had walked away from the Exchange "Web storage system" due to a series of product cancellations and a leaked memo from Steve Ballmer. This was partciularly ironic since their 2001 salvo was to release beta 1 of "Tahoe", which became SharePoint Portal Server 1.0. SPPS 1.0 was built on that already-dead "Web storage system" which has in fact been an albatross around its neck. SPPS 2.0, according to MS, is being rebuilt on SQL Server 2000 -- that's the fastest rip-and-replace I've ever seen from MS.
In 2002, MS issued a press release claiming 100 million seats of Exchange sold, amazing how they got to such a nice, round number a week before Lotusphere. It has since become apparent that this number is not reflective of market reality -- if every customer who buys a "Core CAL" in the Enterprise Agreement is counted, then heck, I think I'm an Exchange user ;) Since we had stopped announcing seats after LS2001, this was a funny way of MS whining "wait!".
I suspect I know why we haven't seen any such activity this month -- MS just went to beta with Exchange 2003. In the meantime, I got an e-mail today of how a customer was provided a customer with a TCO calculator that shows how Exchange is cheaper than Domino -- too bad the data in that calculator is from a 1998 study which compared Exchange 5.5 and Domino 4.6.
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