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:
re “silence is golden”… Sorry to disappoint you, but you may not be quite as aware of the IBM community as you might think. Lyons’ anti-IBM agenda has been well-known since he first — and completely erroneously — declared Notes to be dead back in 1998. There was definitely a reaction from the community, and there is already a reaction brewing to this article, too.
The official IBM response to the earlier article is here:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/n/nhan6d4r5l?OpenDocument&Site=lotus
My response to that article is here:
http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/PowerOfTheSchwartz.nsf/plinks/RSCZ-6B8GYF
In my aggregator, I also see responses to that article from Michael Sampson, Rocky Oliver, John Roling and Tom Duff.
My reaction to the new article is here:
http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/PowerOfTheSchwartz.nsf/d6plinks/RSCZ-6FK2DW
Chris Byrne’s is here:
http://www.controlscaddy.com/A55A69/bccaddyblog.nsf/plinks/CBYE-6FJUXJ
-rich
Oh, and BTW: your posting of the entire text of Forbes’ copyrighted content is a clear violation of fair use as it would be defined in the US. I don’t know what the laws are in your country, but you may want to limit yourself to just posting relevant excerpts in order to avoid getting a letter from Forbes’ attorneys.
@Henning
IBM community is just my term for those who feel less postive by the article.
I do agree with the writing style and the “feeling” the article expresses.
I do not agree with your definition of Lotus Notes. To me it’s a brand is slow but steady transition to Workplace, whatever it is technically.
People are not just moving on either. Look at my other post on LotusScrypt and it’s popularity :http://www.peterdehaas.com/2005/08/searchdomino_we.html
@ Richard,
Thanks for the links. I was unaware of IBM’s official reply.
I have read some of the other replies you referred to. My comments was more to say that the absolute number of responses was low.
Took your advice on posting the entire piece by the way 😉
Well,
who is the IBM community?
Even if there is truth in this article (and I believe there is) the authors style of writing (it reads as if he is trying to take revenge for something) makes it difficult to respond accordingly.
But the IBM community is not only calm on Daniel Lyons, from my opinion it is calm about Notes and Domino at all.
If you define Lotus Notes as Lotus Script, Formula Language, the crippled http engine or Rich Text then there is no need to argue. The fight is over and people are just moving on (from my opinion).
Henning,
You’re absolutely right spot on. What I wanted to illustrate that it is indeed an issue and that people stick to what they have and are used to.
Microsoft certainly has it’s challenges too, I know.
“Thanks to FireFox” IE7 looks great by the way 😉
Peter,
I have read your Lotusscript posting and there are still a lot of people who think that Lotusscript should be enhanced but IBM is not going to do that.
So either you can complaign every day that you want new Lotusscript functions, better formula languages, an improved web engine, a better working designer client but there comes the point that you have to accept that it is not going to happen (at least if you do not want to consider the Workplace platform yet).
This does not change peoples opinion in a searchdomino poll but the discussion itself is over.
This is not an IBM phenomena.
I could also complaign that Microsoft is not supporting Windows 2000 as it would deserve it. I would love IE to support more Web features and I would have preferred to have it in 2002 and not only because Firefox gained some level of success in 2005.
Do you really think I would not be able to find hundreds maybe even thousands of developers who would think that the traditional Visual Basic should be enhanced and better supported (that I do not agree with)?
Workplace is not much different. How many times would you complaign about the 4 GB memory requirements? If you do it ten times and the only response you get is “No problem we also sell the corresponding hardware” or “you have to see Workplace in a bigger context” you decide if it is worth it or not.At the end you would probably be surprised how many companies are going to accept it.