Stu talks about Notes and Workplace Roadmap

Stu has put together a post trying to summarise the rather complicated IBM roadmap for Notes/Domino and Workplace. It raises some good questions. But it doesn’t raise the one that probably concerns me the most.

Does anyone care?

Notes/Domino worked well as a business model when application delivery was client-server focussed. Now that it’s Internet/Browser focussed does anyone actually want to do any development that relies upon another set of infrastructure being available. You’d just do your development in a ‘pure’ Internet environment if you wanted to sell to the widest possible audience. If you strip away the development capabilities, what’s left? Well there is an email and calendaring tool, which the market isn’t moving towards, it’s moving away from.

That I think is the dilemma for IBM. How does it move people over to it’s development platform without loosing the email and calendaring piece. If you loose the email and calendaring piece then you are in great danger of loosing presence, and instant messaging, and then team collaboration, and on it goes.