And I bet you thought this post was going to be about the narcissistic tendencies of certain members of the Lotus Software blogging community didn't you ...
Link: "IBM piles on Microsoft's open document defeat" Two things stand out from the story. Firstly (bolding mine):
IBM also said it will switch to the main OpenOffice.org code base for the text- and other editing applications embedded in Notes 8. Those changes will come with the next maintenance release of the software, which shipped last month. Notes 8 editors now use a derivative of the OpenOffice.org code that IBM developed internally.That aspect of it somehow escaped my attention in the flurry of blog posts, and is fantastic news.
The other jump-out from the story is:
Another example can be seen in Capgemini’s announcement that it will offer IT support around Google Apps.This is also big news, as it starts to bring web-based productivity apps into the mainstream. So suddenly there's a new question to ask. (Okay, it's not really a new question, but it's needs asking again) ....
IBM is clearly seeking to break the dominance of MS Office using the built-in editors in the Lotus Notes 8 client, that much is obvious, ambitious, highly laudable and definitely A Good Thing. But is IBM fighting the right war? Critics of Notes have been saying since 1995 or before that Lotus Notes is "yesterday's technology". But, at least for a part of the market, the day seems to be coming closer when user will live in an online world, where their "productivity applications" are all online Google Apps style tools, email is GoogleMail, and Lotus Notes really IS yesterday's technology. So would Exchange be, by the way, and that's exactly the point.
The big corporates will never go this route until they are able to host the apps themselves, and it's a natural and inevitable step for Google to license their platforms in this way before too long. But the smaller organisations that make up about 90% of the business market may start looking at this seriously. And why would a 1-man-band business care? His data is probably safer on Google Apps than it is on a not-backed-up PC in the spare bedroom anyway, and most people are not ignorant of the risks they're taking without a coherent backup approach - they just don't have the energy/knowledge/rigour to mitigate that properly - so if Google Apps will effectively take care of that for them (at least for a subset of the data) then the online nature of the apps becomes on balance a bonus not a curse.
Where: All Bar One on New Oxford Street
When: 7pm onwards on Thursday 20th September
Why: why not?
What: to exchange tales of dering-do, or just to sink a few beers
Who: largely a coming-together of the Collaboration University and UK Lotus User Group luminaries. Thanks to Matt White (and others - you know who you are) for arranging.
Hope to see you there ...
Now, I am one of those people who tends to get attached to particular gadgets. In my case, I've been dependent on Palms for a number of years. Initially the V, then Vx, and most recently a T|X. For all this time I struggled manfully on with Intellisync to hook the Palm up to Notes. Every upgrade of Notes meant getting hold of (for that read 'buying') a new copy of Intellisync, as somehow they managed to write the software in such a way that it ALWAYS breaks when you upgrade Notes. Now, given that Notes is one of most backward-compatible pieces of software ever created, the only explanation must be (a) they did this deliberately to squeeze more money out of their long-suffering customers, or (b) sheer incompetence.
Well, finally my patience has worn out. Not least because Intellisync has been bought by Nokia and the 'support' website is hopeless (I'm being nice here). But mainly because it simply doesn't work with 8 (please do correct me if I'm wrong - it has been known). So Pylon has been downloaded and .... guess what ... it works. Yes, no half-arsed mucking around in the registry, no being told every time there's a problem that I should uninstall Intellisync AND Notes, manually delete files, fart around with regedit, then reinstall everything to find that it's made not a gnatballsworth of difference.
So, karma restored, my advice to would-be Notes 8 upgraders who, like me, are hopelessly behind the times in other areas .... get yourself a copy of Pylon.
(No gnats were injured during the production of this blog)
