Yeuch - what's that nasty purple thing doing there?!
Stuart McIntyre has summarised the 2007 and 2008 IBM-Lotus strategy positions on his Collaboration Matters blog.
At the end of the post, he makes a point about the odd and uncomfortable position of Websphere Portal in the Lotus branding and strategy:
One minor negative - sort out that Websphere Portal logo IBM!!! Worst case, make a purple version of the yellow/orange Lotus logos. Best case, dual brand the Portal as both a Websphere and a Lotus product (think motor-industry brand engineering), and give it a proper Lotus title and logo!
Something with which I wholeheartedly agree.
The IBM brand for end-user software is Lotus. Notes, Connections, Bluehouse, Quickr: they're all designed primarily to deliver capabilities for normal business 'end users'. Websphere Portal is also end-user software. It's a set of technologies for delivering applications to end users, that runs on top of IBM's own-brand J2EE server - Websphere Application Server. A bit like Lotus Connections does. Or the Lotus SameTime Gateway (for good or bad). Yet, for historical reasons, Portal is stuck in the Websphere brand, even though it is pitched and presented by IBM (at Lotusphere) as a kind-of-is-but-kind-of-isn't-a-Lotus-product thing.
Anyway, you may agree or disagree with Stuart's point and my expansion of it. So head over to Stuart's blog entry and have your say. (I've disabled comments on this post, so all discussion happens in one place)
