Wed 30 Aug 2006
There has been a lot of mainstream press[1][2][3] about Google’s foray into the Office Suite space. They gush about word processing and spreadsheets and Microsoft’s falling behind, the real release is “Google Apps for Your Domain” which targets, not the core of the office suite, but the productivity tools at the periphery such as corporate email, calendaring and IM. This is theoretically a challenge to Notes as well as MS Office, though office has rightly gotten much of the press.
Notes will be fine for a few reasons. In spite of what Ed Brill of IBM says, Notes isn’t for the little guy… it’s for serious, secure, multi admin type shops. These shops won’t let their mission critical apps sit on google’s servers. And secondly, IBMs customer base isn’t going to want their employees looking at or worse clicking on ads on the clock. I know it happens all the time, but I am not wild about corporate IM running through an outside company. Small businesses should be tempted by this sort of offering but right now, there is no overlap with IBM’s customer base.
Update: If you want to see creative uses for maximaizing Notes in your environment, check out AlanLepofsky.net. If you fall in to the “underutilizing Notes” camp, the site has tips for all types of users to get more out of notes.
Tags:google, lotus notes, office
September 2nd, 2006 at 4:58 pm
I think the stronger argument would have been: “Screw Google. Our customers are just way too locked in.”
If customers were actually willing to make the commitment to switch from Notes, they would have already switched to something else.
September 6th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Greg,
Good and in the same time funny conclusion as I would make the same arguments for Microsoft. Ofcourse the “suite” dreams of Google are competitive to a large part of the Microsoft Office installed base, but from an enterprise perspective different arguments
September 6th, 2006 at 6:19 am
..different arguments / rules apply and they are very similar to your perspective
September 11th, 2006 at 5:29 am
It’s amazing how far off a single opinion can be. The real reason that that the Google apps package isn’t a threat is that they do 2 completely different things. While they might be labeled a productivity set of applications, Notes is a rapid application development platform. Unless things radically change with Google’s offering, I don’t see anyone using it to build secure workflow apps any time in the near future. Sure they both do email, but that’s where the comparison has to end.
I also have to take exception with your statement that Notes is solely for the multi-admin environment. In my 12 years in dealing with Notes, that type of situation occurs about as often as a site with a single administrator. At a previous company, I was the single admin and developer for 1500 user Notes environment that used Notes Mail and had a number of mission critical internal applications. Sure our network group had 4 administrators, but Domino was stable enough for me to run on my own. Such is the case with many SMB shops who are able to set and forget their Domino servers and concentrate on more pressing matters, like making sure all of their Windows patches have been applied.
@1 If you can find me a product that does EVERYTHING that Notes can do, then, by all means, shout it out. Don’t even talk about an MS solution, cause they can’t even get their Sharepoint apps to fully work offline. If the only solution for your situation is your current application platform, then you are locked into that platform, no matter what the platform is.
Sean—
September 11th, 2006 at 6:56 am
Thank for taking the time to comment toughtfully Sean. I agree that Notes and any productivity suite are far different. I would add that in my experience (limited to 3 shops as a user / outsider), and from what I’ve read elsewhere, notes is often used for little more than communicating and less often as a development platform. For a group or company that is even trying to collaborate and innovate using Notes / Domino the comparison is likely laughable.
September 17th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
@4
I very much think you are underestimating the power of integration ëverything notes can do” with Office productivity solutions. IBM certainly isn’t hence the development of Hannover with build in abstracts of Office productivity tools.
Google will become competitive to all vendors of communication and collaboration solutions. maybe not to all parts of the platform but still …
Also you should not fully wright off Microsoft by unacurate statement like “Don’t even talk about an MS solution, cause they can’t even get their Sharepoint apps to fully work offline” remember the Groove acquisition Microsoft did over 1 year ago ?