Ed Brill

New, old tactic -- commit to the future

In the last week or ten days, I've been bombarded by requests from customers to provide the "Domino roadmap".  And when something happens that often in that short of a period of time, one can guess where it's coming from -- the competition.  "Ask Lotus whether you'll be able to run Domino in five years", or "aren't they just going to move to a WebSphere architecture after the next release?" ... stuff like that.  

This is a silly game, and it bores me to play it.  Notes and Domino have a sixteen+ year track record, and in the last five, that track record has been very accurate in terms of the promise and the delivery.  Yeah, there was the "Garnet" thing, which I'll hear about at my funeral, but other than that, the features that have been promised have shipped; the release dates have been on-target; the next releases have been publicly announced; and the cycle has predictibly continued every 18-24 months.  The 2007 release -- Notes "Hannover" and Domino "Next" -- have been publicly disclosed, demonstrated, and discussed.  In both client and server cases, indications have been made by the executives at Lotus that there are releases beyond that.  For example, Domino 64-bit support -- Kevin Cavanaugh said at Lotusphere '06 that this would be in beta by Domino "Next" and ship after that.  So there's a specific and measurable commitment to a feature release after "Next".  There are plenty of other examples.

The resources I'm pointing my colleagues to when they ask me about this:

• The Notes/Domino Strategy presentation from Lotusphere 2006
• The Lotus Software Advantage page on ibm.com (including interviews with Mike Rhodin and Ken Bisconti)
• The "Hannover" buzz page at lotus.com/hannover
• Peter O'Kelly's post-Lotusphere blog entries at Collaborationloop.com, especially part two and part three
• The November '05 report where Gartner says that they expect IBM to maintain or increase investment in workplace-related technologies through 2010

and there are plenty of other resources.

What seems especially ironic about being attacked about the Notes/Domino roadmap is that the emperor has no clothes.  What's the comparative track record for Microsoft?

• Exchange 2000 -- shipped 2000
• Exchange "Kodiak" announced 2001 -- Exchange on top of SQL Server announced; "Web Store" from Exchange 2000 declared dead
• 2003 -- still talking about "Kodiak"
• Exchange 2003 -- a simple point release of Exchange 2000 (not the "Kodiak" release), shipped August 2003
• Several Exchange 2000 features dropped, including web conferencing, forms, workflow (and as previously noted, the "Web store")
• Exchange "Kodiak" cancelled 2004
• "Exchange Edge Services" announced May 2004
• "Exchange Edge Services" cancelled December 2004
• Exchange "12" announced January, 2005
• Exchange 12 projected ship -  Late 2006 or early 2007 (more than three years since last release)
• No public announcement has been made of a release of Exchange beyond Exchange 2007.  Recently Bill Gates was quoted as saying they are still working on rebasing Exchange on SQL Server.

And this is all just the Exchange roadmap -- I won't get into Vista, WinFS, "Yukon", etc.

The last thought is on predicting the future in this business.  Three years ago, I couldn't spell S-O-A...now it's one of the most important concepts I'm talking about with customers on a daily basis.  Three years before that, nobody would have predicted spam and compliance to be big issues for messaging.  The software industry moves too fast.  While I can definitely tell you that there are commited plans, and even work going on, for Notes/Domino releases past "Hannover"/"Next", nobody in this industry tries to make bets on specific features or capabilities this far out.  Thus, what we have to stand on as vendors is our past track record.  And the Notes/Domino track record has been one of consistent delivery, evolution without rip-and-replace, innovation, and deployability.  I think I can stand on that -- no need to be defensive.