I had some comments on that a few weeks ago also.
Again some new insights in the comparison of Lotus Notes 8.x vs Microsoft Outlook. A bit of an apples and oranges discussion perphaps, but nevertheless the message is it is not compelling enough.
… It is unlikely that IBM’s latest email client, Lotus Notes 8, will make a dent in Microsoft Outlook’s hegemony.
According to Dion Wiggins, director of strategic development at Strat-etech Consulting, Microsoft’s dominance of the office-productivity software market is part of the reason for users’ reluctance to adopt Lotus Notes as their email client. The Microsoft Office suite bundles Outlook along with its popular word processor, Word, and allows the user to edit email messages with it.
And, although Lotus Notes 8 offers an alternative to Word and includes the OpenOffice.org interface, which allows the user to perform word processing tasks from within the client, including working on Microsoft Office documents, Wiggins is unsure if this is enough to sway Microsoft Outlook users. …
… According to Gartner’s Market Share: Enterprise E-Mail and Calendaring Software, Worldwide report, both Microsoft and IBM grew their market shares by 10.6 percent in 2006. However, Microsoft still maintains its lead with a 47.8 percent market share, compared to IBM’s 42.3 percent.
In January this year, Microsoft launched a set of tools aimed at smoothing the migration of data from Lotus to its own platform, aiming to capture greater market share. …
… Hai Hong Huang, a software research analyst at Gartner, agreed that Lotus Notes 8 will be well received because of third-party applications. “Lotus Notes 8 should significantly improve customer satisfaction in the Lotus customer base — the composite application-development improvements potentially open up rich new possibilities for users,” he said.
However, Huang added that Lotus Notes is unlikely to overtake Microsoft, which has a larger share of the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market: “Lotus’ base is still concentrated in very large accounts and IBM has not done enough to expand its presence in the larger market — organisations with less than 10,000 people.
“On the other hand, Microsoft experienced double-digit revenue growth for Outlook/Exchange in the past several years mainly because of growth in the SMB segments,” Huang added. …
Source: ZDnet
