Ferris analyst David Via was at Lotusphere and posted a report on the Ferris Research weblog.... excerpt:
What I believe all this means is that IBM has cleared away the confusion and uncertainty that their installed base had been experiencing. You can almost hear the sighs of relief among customers here. It is now very clear that Notes technology (and most importantly millions of applications) will live on, effectively embedded in the new Workplace Client.
I'm not that sure how this mind merge of the two will gel.
There appears a mind set if it's not an open standard it must die. I myself don't hold to that view. Often, I find standards based solutions feature poor where proprietary solutions are feature rich. If a standards based solution is all I need I'll use it. If on the other hand, my needs exceed what it offers I'll use what works and ideally a solution which has some life.
The question is standards compliance from the ground up really needed or the ability to interact with them (at all of the levels they are present). Domino and Notes both do have done this quite well. Workplace is more ground up compliant, each product has its merits.
I can't see merging them as the solution without one being handicapped in some way. Then the issue is what will I gain or what will I loose.
The development energy to do this will mean less feature movement for both products in the short term.
Yes, there has been confusion. But is that due to lack of clarity in the media or over stating what is (was) coming down the pike by the previous management team. No one wants to build on a dyeing platform.