Red Bull – Microsoft and IBM

Stu talks about the latest Microsoft release of Lotus Notes to Exchange (and others) migration toolkit. He thinks it’s a good thing, so do I.

The thing that I personally find interesting though is how this huge reaction from the Lotus Notes side of the debate will impact on customer perception. A negative to reaction to something doesn’t always get the reaction you were looking for.

For instance, the only people actively promoting knowledge of the toolkit are people who would rather it was never used. Just by acknowledging it existence they are acknowledging that there is an issue. This will mean that some customers will become uncomfortable and start an assessment process that they never would have previously.

My personal belief is that IBM Lotus have a strong technical story but that they aren’t telling the story. The current round of updates have all been focussed (in their presentation) on stuff that end-users couldn’t care less about. IBM seem to have missed the point that the end-user, particularly in this arena, is king and queen. IBM seem to dismiss continually the issues that end-users raise about usability even though they are fixing them. I’ve even been in a discussion with a customer who has said that they are leaving Notes just because of the end-user experience, they were more concerned that their staff were not enjoying their technology experience than the cost of running the infrastructure. Whether Outlook was really the answer to this customers problems can be debated for ever, but the main point was that they didn’t see anything from IBM that was going to make it any better.

Knowledge workers who use Notes or Outlook spend more than 80% using the products and their experience has to be impeccable. All that you have to do is to add a few minutes to each user each day; project costs for a migration are tiny in comparison. Expand that experience into Instant Messaging and other collaboration tools and the numbers just get bigger and bigger.  

That is where IBM needs to take the fight to Microsoft – at the end-user. They are the ones who will make all of the decisions. But don’t do it for Notes, do it for the whole collaboration experience.

(I have no idea why it’s “Red Bull” – how naive of me)