Mail wars
Category Collaboration
A current topic of discussion on a number of blogs is Microsoft's newest initiative to migrate Notes/Domino customers to Exchange. To a great extent, I think that any campaign to convince customers to move from one platform or the other for the sake of mail is never going to make sense on a strictly dollars and sense basis. When the implementation is further complicated with applications then it becomes a complete fools errand. To a great extent, this cuts both ways. In my opinion anyone who has chosen to implement Exchange rather than Domino is either misguided or most likely bowed to political pressure from higher ups that were influenced by FUD marketing. However, once it's been implemented, I would not try to sell that customer Domino using an economic based argument. (Thankfully there are plenty of technological reasons, not the least of which is the unstable single data store used by Microsoft, to convince a customer to migrate to Domino.) When applications are added to the mix it becomes even more difficult to make a convincing argument. Again, the advantage goes to IBM because there are no Exchange apps, and millions of Domino apps.
A current topic of discussion on a number of blogs is Microsoft's newest initiative to migrate Notes/Domino customers to Exchange. To a great extent, I think that any campaign to convince customers to move from one platform or the other for the sake of mail is never going to make sense on a strictly dollars and sense basis. When the implementation is further complicated with applications then it becomes a complete fools errand. To a great extent, this cuts both ways. In my opinion anyone who has chosen to implement Exchange rather than Domino is either misguided or most likely bowed to political pressure from higher ups that were influenced by FUD marketing. However, once it's been implemented, I would not try to sell that customer Domino using an economic based argument. (Thankfully there are plenty of technological reasons, not the least of which is the unstable single data store used by Microsoft, to convince a customer to migrate to Domino.) When applications are added to the mix it becomes even more difficult to make a convincing argument. Again, the advantage goes to IBM because there are no Exchange apps, and millions of Domino apps.
While you couldn't tell it from the proceeding paragraph, I don't consider myself an anti-microsoft zealot and in fact I've been a long time fan of some of their products. I've been an advocate and user of Word since the first version did Wysiwyg (haven't used that term in years) and everyone else was using Word Perfect and Multimate. I don't think I made any friends at Lotus arguing for a NT version of Notes when the rest of the world was focused on the Novell version. So if Microsoft came out with a innovative, ground-breaking collaborative product I'd be happy to jump into it and if it made sense, sell it to Domino customers. However trying to convince anyone to scrap something that is working and constantly improving for a long in-the-tooth mail system (that they are willing to give away) just doesn't make any sense.
There is room for tremendous advances in helping people collaborate. Notes/Domino is not the perfect product and there is still much more that can be done with collaboration. Right now it seems that IBM that is spending money on innovation, and Microsoft is spending money on marketing. Marketing may win some battles, but innovation will win the war every time.