While most of the attendees at Lotusphere love to sit back and listen to Ed's "The Boss Loves Microsoft" session, Graham Chastney thinks that the points Ed make miss the mark.

Today I read through Ed Brill’s presentation on “My Boss Loves Microsoft – where does that leave Lotus?” I have seen most of the arguments before a hundred times and to be honest – they don’t carry any weight with anyone I have ever talked to. I’m assuming that because this session is a popular re-run people are actually using these arguments but it’s not the reality I am living in.

Graham goes on to say that Ed shouldn't focus on the virus issue, the concocted analyst reports, or the oft-canceled move to SQL. Instead, he thinks that reliability and scalability, a clear development direction with examples, and ease of integrated collaboration should be the focus of such a session.

First, I have to nit-pick on something that has nothing to do with the content of the entry. The only way to comment on the entry is to login to a Typepad account. Since I am not a Typepad user, I would have to create an account just to post a comment and that is more than should be asked for readers of any blog.

Aside from that, I am not sure I agree very much with Graham's point of view.

Influential people hate the Notes client, and they are the people who count. They are communication people not application people as such they couldn’t give a stuff about the applications.

I think it is wrong to portray them as communication people. In their mind, the only communication vehicle they are thinking about is email and only email that is sent person to person. They never think about notifications from applications, enhanced support via IM, or integration with voice and fax solutions. If they did, they would never look at Outlook due to it's severe limitations as a communication tool. In reality, Outlook is nothing but an email client and it is our jobs as consultants to educate the decision makers about the other possibilities that exist. If we allow them to believe that Outlook is the Holy Grail of communication tools, then we are doing a disservice to our clients. And just because a large group of people believe that something is true doesn't mean that it is true. I mean for a large part of our history, humans believed that the Earth was flat and that the Sun revolved around it and that saying it wasn't so was blasphemous. Is that belief any less preposterous than believing that Outlook is a collaboration tool?

The virus and security discussions doesn’t hold water either because they all know someone who is running Exchange successfully

That, my friend, is hogwash. It's like saying that drunk driving isn't risky cause we all have a friend who drives drunk all the time and has never been in an accident. Historically destructive episodes like the I Love You outbreak make strong arguments that, as far as viruses and worms are concerned, Outlook and Exchange are much more vulnerable than Notes and Domino.

I’ve heard it said to me “Microsoft must have a story that works because others are doing it.” Some of the technical spin in the presentation make this worse.

Unfortunately for me, I have not been privy to such an organization. I have never seen a full blown MS environment working on all cylinders so I have no way of determining if they can really do what they say they can do. But the problem that I have with the "Analyst" reports is that they are factually wrong. If they didn't fly in the face of the true numbers so badly, I would be more tempted to believe them. If the same couple of analysts weren't the ones causing all the problems, I would be more cordial to their points. But to sit back and let people out right lie and say nothing about it is a very bad business practice and has gone on too long at IBM. Hopefully, the new anti-BS site will help officially respond to the FUD out there in the world.

I wouldn’t talk to much about Microsoft’s delayed/postponed/cancelled move to SQL Server

Now that's just silly. If you can't use MS's missed deadlines and broken promises, then how are you supposed to compare the 2 product lines. If MS can come in and say that XYZ is going to happen, IBM should be able to challenge that based on their passed actions. Since it's been more than 2 years after they were supposed to be moving off the Jet engine for performance and reliability reasons, IBM should be able to use that as a reason to not believe any enhancements to the core of Exchange.

In the end, if the 2 product lines were really put to the test side by side, this type of session would no longer be necessary. Until that time, Ed should continue to provide his point of view to help the community combat the FUD. Continue to praise the advantages that Domino has while focusing light on the misrepresentations of it's competition.