More Bad News For Lotus Notes

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Daniel Lyons has written a new article over on Forbes.com about the marketshares of IBM and Microsoft in the eMail / Collaboration market. On his last article, which was quite clear and direct on IBM position, the repsonse from the IBM community was limited to none; silence is golden ?

…The past few years have been rough for IBM’s Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration program. And now there is more bad news.
Two top market research firms, Gartner and IDC, have published new reports showing IBM (nyse: IBM – news – people ) lost yet more e-mail market share to Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) in 2004.
Both research firms now say Microsoft Exchange is king of e-mail, a market Notes once dominated with more than a 60% share.
IDC says sales of Exchange grew 23% in 2004, to $950 million, while Notes sales grew 5% to $745 million. By the end of 2004, Exchange held 51% of the market, versus 40% for Notes, IDC says. That’s a wider gap than in 2003, when IDC estimated Exchange held a 47% market share versus 43% for Notes.
Gartner estimates Exchange now has a 48% market share versus 45.2% for Notes….


Always good to have new insights to the marketshare discussion 🙂

…IBM’s biggest advantage is that many Notes customers have written loads of small applications that run on Notes, and the pain of rewriting all those applications for a Microsoft environment is so great that many just stick with Notes.
Microsoft now is trying to overcome that hurdle by writing software that makes it easier for Notes customers to switch to Microsoft.
The company is also trying to convince third-party developers who write add-on applications for Notes to start writing those applications for Microsoft’s platform.
“We’re definitely targeting Notes developers,” says Gary Devendorf, a former IBM Notes product manager who switched teams in 2003, joining Microsoft as a technical evangelist. …


I’ve commented on this application lock-in more than once in the past. IT is ofcourse not only a matter of migration for the sake of switching platforms. It is the opportunity to consolidate/ rationalise the application base as well

  • Update 24-8-2005:
  • IBM has responded to the earlier article aparently with their own version of the facts (see comments)
  • It took Richard Schwartz’ advise on not publishing the whole article (copyright / fair use) and only put in the highlights (that was a tough one choosing)