« Catching up on steps... | Main| I don't buy this connection between computer games and violence »

Interesting discussions taking place

Category
There have been some interesting discussions taking place over at Jake Howlett's blog and Volker's blog around Domino and the things people say about it in the last few days.

I have to say I can associate with Jake's perspective. I will often and quite happily post stuff about Sametime that is both negative and positive. I treat it as almost a public service, helping others should they hit the same situation and helping people improve their Sametime environment. Also I've been happy to hit IBM with a very public stick when I felt it was necessary, who can remember my spot the difference, or the steps IBM should take to sell more Sametime? I know some people in IBM didn't appreciate either of them, but then I also know that many customers were able to take spot the difference for example show it to their sales rep and ask why they were paying for maintenance, and if there's one thing we know about IBM, it's money talks. This is not necessarily an easy thing to do, I am a key part of Instant Technologies, pissing off IBM is not in our best interest, it has ramifications for things like Lotus Awards, customer referrals, press releases all sorts of things, so even I am trying to walk a fine line. But sometimes, especially during the dark Sametime days, things just needed to be said as the worlds second largest software company just wasn't getting it.

So where I am coming from on this? Well I agree with much of what Jake has said, if IBM was great and Domino was fantastic, then Jake would only be able to write about the cool things he does with Domino, he wouldn't have an opportunity to gripe. Domino is not new, so doesn't get the allowance that some of tese Web2.0 startups get, Domino is a mature product so we should expect a lot from it.

It's important to remember Jake is British and us Brits are a funny old lot, If you listen to us on the news, you could hear that World Peace was declared, but the British journalist can still come out with something like "Well world peace is all well and good, but it doesn't help the millions who died in the process", in other words, you can be riding high and we can still find something to bring you down in a split second, no idea why we do this, but we do. I personally have turned this into a great skill with women, within a bout 5 seconds of looking at a woman I can tell you what her personal anxieties are with regard to her physical appearance, a truly astonishing skill that very few women appreciate, strange that. We typically find the rah rah cheerleaders pretty irritating, we like to hear how things really are, warts and all, and we believe everyone else likes the same.

Anyway where was I, oh yeah Domino, well to be honest there is nothing quite like it. Even for Web apps, I have customers where there is no other solution that can offer the capabilities Domino can, take for example the military who operate on high latency networks with super slow connections. They swear by Domino replication, it allows them to move web content to the local network seamlessly and with very little human intervention. being able to operate in these environments. But also anyone that has experience with Domino, knows it's irritating points will also know that the minute you take a complex, yet effective Domino solution and start moving it to some other platform be it Websphere, IIS, LAMP, Rails or whatever, there is a whole lot of stuff in Domino that you take for granted that you just don't get with a lot of work. or additional products such as:
  • Reader Fields
  • Replication
  • Offline Capabilities
  • Inbuilt Security
  • A directory
  • Support for different programming models, Javascript, Java, Lotusscript, servlets, C++, C, VB etc.
  • e-Mail server
  • IMAP, POP3 support
  • Automatic design updates, key in a distributed model where the same design is being used on multiple servers
  • and the list goes on and on and on...

There have been times I have tried to move away from Domino, but the more I try and get away from Domino and look at alternatives the more I discover it's flexibility and power. I believe Jake's point and question is this, what's happening to improve the domino side of things, he can see changes coming in Notes 8, but what about the server? email server performance has been improved in recent releases, but what about Domino HTTP performance? I mean there are things that bug me about Domino, the views displayed on the web in Domino haven't been updated since internotes, what about out of the box ajax views with column sorting that works? What about ajax widgets for date pickers, time pickers, drop down lists etc. out of the box? GZip compression was supposed to be in Domino by now, it is but not supported, this could greatly improve performance for some of our customers on slow networks. How about a Domino JVM that can't be so easily brought down by bad code? What about Sametime integration in the web where it says hey you picked awareness for this field in Notes, I'll just automatically convert it for display on the web etc. There is room for much improvement in Domino, but even today it still kicks ass in the right hands. People who criticize getting feedback from their customers, the very people who pay their salaries really should think hard about this, If you listen to your customers and act upon your customers comments it's becomes very hard for a customer to leave you.

If I was a Lotus SE and I saw IBMers writing negative stuff about Domino, then I would probably agree with some people's stances that if you don't have something positive to say then don't say it. But hell we're paying customers we can say whatever the hell we like. OK my meaningless ramble is over.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Carl,

You're absolutely spot on with all of your comments. Every so often I get annoyed with Domino, it obviously has its problems but each time I come back because there is nothing out there that can compete across the board.

I am guessing the reasoning for letting nHTTP slide over the last few years can be traced back to Scott Good's discovery: http://www.scottgood.com/jsg/blog.nsf/d6plinks/SGOD-6VMTYG there just aren't enough of us doing the "bleeding edge" web development to justify the investment from IBM. Personally I think this is a short sighted view and smacks of a company trying to keep existing customers rather than win new ones. But then maybe I've read the situation wrong?

Matt

Gravatar Image2 - Hi Carl. Interesting you talking about the being British element to it all. Sometimes I feel a little misunderstood on my site and can't help feeling this has a lot to do with people not knowing how we go about things over here.
Cheers,
Jake

Gravatar Image3 - There is alot of talk about IBM not pushing Domino. I can help thinking that when Lotus owned Domino it was the flag ship product and got the lions share of the marketing budget, hype and attention. However, now that Domino is in the IBM portfolio it is also competing with other products. The reality is that Domino/Notes isn't IBMs flag ship product and doesn't get the hype that perhaps some of the other product do by comparison.

I wonder if IBM spends more on marketing Notes than Lotus ever did ? According to Ed they have more developers and more UI people. Maybe it's just a perception when comparing with the WebSphere products.

Gravatar Image4 - @Carl, Jake.

Hi chaps! Being a fellow Brit, and abroad, I was only mentioning this to a colleague yesterday when discussing the various threads.

I can only agree that in a lot of the recent hot topics, cultural differences (for want of a better term) in expression appear to have been an element helping keep things interesting!

All good stuff!

Post A Comment

:-D:-o:-p:-x:-(:-):-\:angry::cool::cry::emb::grin::huh::laugh::rolleyes:;-)