PCMag.com Michael Miller: The real Outlook competitor

October 2 2007

Michael Miller writes his first impressions of the Notes 8 client:

Now I know many of you reading this think Notes vanished years ago, and indeed, it sure felt like IBM gave up on it for years, preferring instead to talk about things like Workplace, which never took off. But the Notes client and Domino mail server have survived. In fact, I've seen market research studies showing it still has somewhere between 20% and 40% of the market, concentrated in larger accounts. Outlook is more popular, but Notes remains a big presence.

IBM has recognized this, and with Notes 8, it has created by the far the biggest upgrade to Notes in a decade or more. ...

I work for a company that runs Notes, so I was thrilled to be able to move to a new version that seems a lot more modern than anything IBM has offered before.

Notes 8 is the biggest change in the product in years, giving the produce a much more modern, more standard user interface.
Positive words from Miller, while indicating some areas for improvement.  Miller also notes the change in tone and attitude he detected from the IBM team at the recent Lotus Collaboration Summit event in New York.

Some good comments discussion going already on the PCMag site.

Link: PCMag.com Michael Miller: The real Outlook competitor >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Notes and Domino 8  Add/View Comments [19]

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  1. 1  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 10/2/2007 9:50:47 AM

    Speaking of competition- is there any literature regarding the IBM/Lotus position relative to gmail, yahoo, etc. Normally I laugh when I hear suggestions of moving corporate mail/calendar to search engine based companies, *but* I'm hearing it a lot more frequently. I (small customer, about 150 users) went through a very nice demo for me of gmail calendar- I've never used it, but all I could say was "wow". For now, there's a lot more value-add that Notes/Domino brings that can easily squash that discussion, however it seems the search engine companies are getting close to that critical mass of apps that would be appealing enough for someone to pull the trigger and give it a shot.

  1. 2  Roberto Boccadoro  | 10/2/2007 12:04:58 PM

    @1 - My first take would be "security, anyone ?". My mails in the hand of a search engine company ? Mmmm....

    I can still remember one of the biggest issues of a product we had, Knowledge Management System. The only idea of having a spider crawl thru a user mailfile, was hair-rising for them. And it was an "internal" system, managed by the company. Can you imagine if a similar system would be managed by an external company ?

    Disclaimer : this is MY position, not IBM/Lotus one.

  1. 3  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/2/2007 12:53:20 PM

    @1 & 2 - The way I like to put it is simple. "Google's entire business model is based on maximizing public availability of information, regardless of whether it's copyrighted or a trade secret. What do you think youTube is?"

  1. 4  Mika Heinonen http://www.siipi.com/mika | 10/2/2007 1:43:28 PM

    I'm running a study about the feasibility that big companies could replace their existing commercial operating systems and office tools completely with OpenSource/Freeware programs.

    If this indeed would be possible, I think many CEO's would be interested to hear that they could save $2-4 billion USD per year by losing nothing, usually even getting more.

    This would of course also mean that Outlook will be replaced by better tools, and Notes 8 is a very possible replacement, although it's more than just a e-mail tool, or maybe because of that it's more than an e-mail tool.

    E-mail alone is quite useless nowadays, as collaboration solutions are in the trend, due to obvious cost-saving and time-reducing reasons.

  1. 5  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 10/2/2007 2:51:46 PM

    @3 Did you really just quote yourself ? Classic. { Link }

  1. 6  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/2/2007 3:40:27 PM

    @5 - Did I? I've used the phrase before. Probably even here. I can hardly imagine I'm the only person to express security concerns over the idea, either.

    Are you trying to suggest my observation is not novel? Or is this your attempt to reply to my question about you quoting Dan Lyons' Fake Steve Jobs about IBM strategy?

  1. 7  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/2/2007 4:28:00 PM

    @4 - I'm curious how many companies spent $2-4 billion annually in LICENSING COSTS. That would be... surprising.

  1. 8  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/2/2007 4:28:01 PM

    @4 - I'm curious how many companies spent $2-4 billion annually in LICENSING COSTS. That would be... surprising.

  1. 9  Mika Heinonen http://www.siipi.com/mika | 10/2/2007 4:46:20 PM

    @7 & 8 I made a rough cost calculation based that an big companies have in average about 300000 workers, and Vista Business costs around $300 USD (one time cost), then add the costs for Microsoft Office and other licenses (one time costs also). Those one-time-costs are also blurred by annual Microsoft Select licensing fees.

    Annually also about a third if the hardware has to renewed (Linux could prolong the life-time of older hardware also), which adds to the annual costs. Also from my experience big companies have to pay monthly support fees to their IT organizion (internal or external), which goes also around $100 per month per user (personnel salaries, backup, maintenance (windows upgrades cause a lot of work too), mailbox harddisk usage, company policy leasing models, etc....

    Some numbers may vary up and down, so that I think the average is still in the range between 2-4 billion.

  1. 10  Flemming Riis  | 10/2/2007 5:18:29 PM

    -I made a rough cost calculation based that an big companies have in average about 300000 workers.

    here is where you fail.

    there is no such thing as a rough calculation with 300k users.

  1. 11  Mika Heinonen http://www.siipi.com/mika | 10/2/2007 5:24:38 PM

    @10 Well, the bigger the number of users, the bigger the variation and miscalculation of course. Tell me, if you have some real numbers, what is the average IT cost per user in the biggest companies which is not using Linux and OpenSource programs, it should't be a secret.

  1. 12  Ed Maloney  | 10/2/2007 6:40:23 PM

    @4 "E-mail alone is quite useless nowadays" Really? Have you tried turning off the mail server for 15 minutes during business hours?

  1. 13  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 10/2/2007 6:40:43 PM

    @6 "The" "point" "is" "you" "literally" "quoted" ""YOURSELF"". Sage words indeed. "Write that down Timmy".

  1. 14  Mika Heinonen http://www.siipi.com/mika | 10/2/2007 6:49:05 PM

    @12 Umm, e-mail alone doesn't mean in my opinion that e-mail itself is useless, but e-mail alone is useless. Just having an inbox doesn't bring any collaboration and teamwork, however having Notes based e-mail (which is an total underestimation of Notes, but it's possible!), allows you to collect sametime chats, calendar entries, discussion threads (in real n-tree structure!), automatic archiving, automatic combining of e-mail entries into other databases, automatic spam filtering, and all of those are just out-of-the-box examples which can and should be modified for tuned-in coorporate use.

  1. 15  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/2/2007 7:25:50 PM

    @13 - Ah, well, yes... I was quoting myself in the sense of "this is how I say it to a customer" instead of "this is how I need to put it on Ed's blog so someone like Gary Sweeting can attempt a witty comeback."

    But hey, next time I'll quote FSJ, and then my words can also be parsley, thyme and rosemary. Will that meet with your approval, sweetness?

  1. 16  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/2/2007 7:31:50 PM

    Alright, children, let's move along... :)

  1. 17  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/2/2007 7:39:02 PM

    @9 - 300,000 * 300 = 90 MILLION. Let's be generous, and say that Vista + Office + other packages = $1000/employee/annum. That's $300 MILLION. That still places your number off by an order of magnitude.

    And I hope you don't seriously think that a company with 300K users would actually pay retail license rates.

    I also tend to wonder how many employers with over 300K employees have 300K USERS? { Link } I could see perhaps Siemens or IBM or Citigroup needing an Office license for every user, but Walmart? McDonalds? The US Postal Service?

    All of which is not to say that there aren't dramatic cost savings involved in using open source software, of course. I'm pretty certain I've advocated open source stuff on occasion.

  1. 18  Ed Brill  | 10/2/2007 7:44:57 PM

    Comment deleted... I said...let's move along.

  1. 19  Mika Heinonen http://www.siipi.com/mika | 10/3/2007 1:25:53 AM

    @17 You're right, I think I typed one zero too much, so it should have been originally $200-$400 million :)