There have been a couple of articles this week that have not been exactly favorable toward Notes/Domino. While a number of people have taken these authors to task (see Chris' Fighting FUD page), Ed had been uncharacteristically quiet about the whole thing. Well, he has finally taken the time to write out his thoughts on the issue.

First, don't lose sight of the bottom line. According to Gartner, for 2004, IBM commands an impressive 45% of the e-mail market. [Note that this number wasn't cited in the article referenced above]. IDC's number is a bit lower. Either way, the corporate e-mail/ICE market is now entirely a duopoly -- with Novell, Oracle, and Bob's e-mail server fighting it out for less than 10% of the market.

It is important to keep this point in mind when reading things about some of the minor players in the enterprise messaging sector. Even saying that, it is interesting to see how "market share" is actually calculated. Although it would be an impossible task, I wish there was an easier way to count the number of people using each product. I would also love to know the number of seats in companies where Domino is still being used for applications when management has decided to move to Exchange. Exactly where is the savings when that happens?

So, with all of this, I'm not taking my toys and going home. There are over 100 Notes/Domino 7 launch events scheduled in the next 75 days. I can't attend too many in person, but you'll see executive commitment from IBM at the vast majority of them. The product rocks, the roadmap is clear, and for all the noise coming out of Redmond, ultimately they have a pile o' 16 products that somehow try to compete with Domino. I'll keep my bet on yellow, and can't wait to see what we are talking about this time next year.

16 different products?? Are you kidding me? I have never been able to understand how people can still compare the Notes/Domino platform with Exchange instead of with the plethora of products necessary to do "true collaboration" in the MS environment. Of course, I have yet to visit a site using MS that has collaboration applications that rival most Domino shops. In fact, I think that Oracle understands this better than MS when it positioned it's new collaboration platform, Oracle Workspaces, against Sharepoint and not Exchange. As with any solution that requires multiple servers to succeed, getting all the pieces to work in harmony is not something that is easily accomplished.

What I would really love to see is for experts from both companies to meet at a Battle of the Platforms. Each group would be allowed to have a similar number of team members and all the software that is usually distributed to customers. Without any outside help or prior knowledge, they would have to follow the application life cycle that we all have to deal with. They would initially be given either a set of requirements or a group of people that they would have to get the requirements out of. The amount of time that the groups would have would be limited and they would have to take into account a budget for hardware and software. And like all good projects, thing would change as the project went along. Group members would be given additional responsibilities, transferred to other departments, or quit for another job. Requirements would change and then maybe change back, time frames and budget would get adjusted without regard for the impact on the project, virus and worm outbreaks would occur, and other projects in the company would be introduced that would adversely effect the solution they were trying to implement. Then, and only then, we might be able to see which platform is better for developing collaborative solutions, not that I truly have any doubts.