Is IBM fighting the right war?
This story has been around in the blogosphere since yesterday, but the reporting of it on NetworkWorld.com caught my eye.
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.
