Stowe Boyd joins the "Notes sucks" meme
Stowe Boyd has been reading Sim',Dave,and me...:Thepoint that is missed by the Lotus Notes advocates is that people want tobe able to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with anyone, not justthose who are using the same programs as them. That's why email was thekiller app of Web 1.0 -- it worked that way. And Notes has fallen by thewayside, an asterisk in the collaboration chronicles, but all being said,not really very successful -- aside from the acquisition by IBM as a counterto Microsoft's enterprise email dominance. An asterisk? How does a product get mentioned as one of the "tenmost important products of the 1990s"if it is only an "asterisk"? And how could you describe a productthat is growing double-digits (over the last several reported quarters),that has 61,000 global customers today, and that is the basis for literallymillions of collborative applications as "not really very successful"? Stowe seems to have missed the chapter in Notes history, ten years ago,where Domino made Notes applications available via web browser (and now,in Domino 7, via web services). It hasn't been the case for a verylong time that it only works for "those who are using the same programs". The classic example, from wayback in 1998, is Chrysler'sSCORE application, which involved their suppliers in saving billions ofUS dollars. Many of the Notes successesover the years are extranet types of scenarios. There's also theelement of surfacing Domino applications in portals or WebSphere applications,another way of extending them (which, too, has been available for manyyears). Putting aside the past history, Notes is about to be reinvented, yet again,for the next generation of collaboration. One of the major objectivesof Notes"Hannover" is aplatform for "composite" applications, expanding its reach beyondDomino server applications. Notes, in this scenario, will be ableto leverage/surface componentized collaboration services. You'llbe hearing more about this (and seeing it) in the weeks ahead. Now the last bit is that Stowe believesThe right thingto do is to build collaboration into the apps that people are using. Orbuild small, focused collaborative apps that do one thing right. This isone of the lessons of Web 2.0.Yes, the vision of "contextualcollaboration" has been in the industry for several years now. Partof the promise of Web Services and SOA is to do exactly this. Butbuilding small, focused collaborative apps that do one thing right -- theindustry actually tried that over the last several years, and it hasn'texactly worked out. Think of Zaplets, or Kubi's 1.0 incarnation,or Radnet, or tons of other single-purpose collaboration tools that haven'tgone anywhere. I remain hopeful that it will come out of the currentand future work from IBM, Microsoft, or left field -- but I doubt thatthe idea of a rich, integrated client will fade anytime soon.Link: CoranteGet Real: Lotus Notes sucks>
