I guess I have a reasonable view of things from several different angles.

As a person who has worked for years in "corporate IT", certainly in London there is no doubt that Notes/Domino is under threat from many angles. The silly thing is that there is no particular reason other than the grass seeming greener. Whenever I have been involved in these sorts of discussions, you show what Domino as an app dev platform can do, and your arm gets bitten off for new projects, especially if you can integrate well with other platforms using web services or A.N.Other technology.

The problem is that there aren't that many "specialist Notes/Domino developers" who have kept up with changes since the 6/7 days so people don't know about all the cool things that can be done. The days when someone could learn to be a Notes developer in short order with no IT background are quite a long way behind us for all but the simplest applications.

From the independent developer's point of view it's all about the public profile, in my view. If you build a good list of references, keep your visibility up in the Lotus community and work very very hard, there is a living to be made. But, and this is key, you need to know other technologies than just Notes and Domino, for me it's web dev and Java, but MS or PHP or whatever are equally valid routes. I'd say it's close to impossible to be a pure Notes/Domino independent developer.

And, finally, in my schizophrenic lifestyle, we have the sale of products (IdeaJam and IQJam in my case). Again, this is a case of working with a great team like Elguji has (hat tip to Bruce and Gayle), and spending a huge amount of time sweating over the details. Whether it's the coding, the marketing, the sales, support and so on. A great job, if you enjoy technology and the new internet economy. I should imagine, that if you don't it would be utter hell as the lines between private and work lives become very blurred.

All just my two penn'orth. A great blog post by the way though.

Matt

thanks matt. very, very interesting perspective.

part of the reason i posted this, besides my own weirdly evolving situation:

i don't know if my facts are right, even if they are close, things are always changing, and clearly lotus is really and truly firing on all cylinders these days. having said that, ibm would have known they were losing market share regarding email specifically well before the rest of the market figured it out. only M$ might have had as clear a view of the competitive landscape, and if so, might explain all of their "lotus is dead" remarks, etc.

but what i am "seeing" (and seeing is too strong a word really) is that, when you take the email game into account, assuming M$ is winning that front, and then you look at the things Lotus is doing in the last few years, not just with the client, but with finally beefing up Designer, adding new ways to do development, and so forth, well what i think i see is how the game overall is being played. Domino continues to live inside many of the companies that Exchange has won over, since Exchange is only email, and Domino apps are extremely difficult to cost effectively mimic in other technologies. and then you see IBM figuring out other things like how to allow Active Directory to be the core address book (supposedly coming in 8.5.2) and really you see a whole shift toward applications as the central nexus, or the ground so to speak upon which Domino continues to live and to move forward.

this is just me thinking out loud. i'm just one guy. but i think about this stuff, and right now i'm thinking a little harder about it than usual.

I think there's are two different games going on here. I'm really not well qualified to talk about mail. I do agree with you that Domino continues to live on inside companies which have, in theory, migrated to Exchange. The development platform is just too powerful and flexible to be able to get off it easily. The logic of running Exchange and Domino has always escaped me, but if it allows me to continue with the dev work that I love then it's fine with me.

IBM for sure will deny a 70% market share for Exchange. I think they currently deny everything that claims much more than 50 for Exchange.

If you ask about the future of Notes and Domino maybe hardly anyone will be able to do a precise prediction. While I see Domino under fire I cannot confirm that there already is a competitor that is able to replace the complete Notes and Domino software stack. Also in many companies I visit nowadays there still would be a lot of potential for a product like Lotus Notes but for various reasons it is not on their radar. Still a company of the size of IBM has all possibilities to make things happen.

Notes and Domino without mail but just for development. An interesting idea although I think one of the best use cases for unstructured data is mail. If you remove that you are at risk to have lots of discussions about SQL and / other strategic platforms within a company. I mean even products like Connections or Sharepoint use SQL to do their stuff. I know that people like Matt White (nice comment in 1) are quite raving about XPages. From a web perspective I cannot share all the enthusiasm. There are a lot of powerful web application platforms nowadays (no secret I recently fell in love with Grails and Groovy but there are other players like Google (Wave/GWT), Ruby on Rails or the sheer amount of PHP applications and / or Open Source applications. In this case Domino is just another player in the market. If you lose mail and the client you will have a tough job to keep your platform moving (but certainly not impossible).

From an ISV point of view it would be dangerous to generalize the experience of Elguji (IdeaJam /IQJam). Outstanding products and exceptional marketing. No surprise they won so many awards (although even with all the success some still keep their day job). If web applications would look and work like IdeaJam and clients apps would look like Project Bones from Lotus911 I would not be afraid.

what i know for sure is that the picture is very complex. whether we are talking about the big competitive landscape or the political / technical machinations inside of just one company, or the vagaries of mixed environments of various stripes, the whole thing is very, very complex. it's beautiful to me actually and i like thinking about it. i'd probably have fun being an analyst.

henning - "one of the best use cases for unstructured data is mail" - very interesting and i definitely agree!

matt - what the logic is for running exchange / domino at the same time is, i don't know either. what i do know is that political games supersede technical arguments.

I don't know for sure what is going on in the market either. But I do know that IBM folk sell the app dev features to my company, not email.

It is also interesting to look back to the pre-IBM days. Again, this is unconfirmed rumor, but I recall talk about the idea of email being removed from Notes, letting Notes be an application platform while cc:Mail handled communications.

Obviously, that is nowhere near where it really went... but it does make me wonder if we are coming full-circle.

Jonvon - 'technical arguments' is never the reason companies use Exchange for mail and Domino for applications. It is always either 'business arguments' or 'I don't like Notes' arguments. Most often, there is no logic at all and I've just learned to live with it.

For instance, I've seen *large* companies migrate to Exchange because they couldn't find anyone to support the Notes environment at the low rate they wanted to pay. Exchange admin is cheap and easily available and that's been the prime reason we've seen migrations.

dave - ibm selling appdev to your company - interesting. Notes appdev does rock. i love it. we are "this close" to having 8.5.1 up and running. can't wait to start playing.

warren - they migrate based on the cost of an admin team alone? amazing. you'd think someone around there would, i don't know, fire up a spreadsheet or something.

I will go on a limb and say Gmail is actually pulling more Notes business right now than Exchange is. Exchange probably has the quantity in users, but gmail has the quantity in organizations.

Having said that, it still is small. How many came into the fold, let's say not as many as leave.

Kind of like the # of people residing in Florida has adjusted too.

One can beat the competition if one knows what they are doing in that discussion. Many people shy away from it, but it's not that difficult.

Is there a smaller messaging market and what will Domino do? If the direction of what runs Sametime, Connections and Quickr is any indication, Domino may be left to be a mail server.

So it's all in how you see it.

As an admin, I prefer to think of Domino as a base level to a greater sharing network.

Warren is right, technical arguments have never been a reason to move. Costs (however misplaced they are) and/or politics and bias for Outlook, are the top reasons companies switch.

However if you hire bad and pay bad it won't matter which system you use it will still be unreliable.

if you saw my posts from last week, even when the client is seeing their Exchange box fail monthly, they won't accept lotus as the answer even when i can prove to them their own lotus server hasn't failed in years.

I have not done Notes for a few years, now. I had to choose between my company and Notes and I went with other opportunities within the company.

I have recently been working with a lot of Tivoli tools- IBM stuff. One of their tools is replacing a Notes app that has been in production here in one form or other since 1998. Eleven frikin years. Two comments on things "Notes" that I've noticed in this effort.

1. This new tool, a bohemoth in both install (OMG you wouldn't believe!!!) and cost, has a very very hard time doing some things Notes does so frikin easily (want a radio button? not in this new tool). I look at our main developer on this project (another Notes guy) and we constantly say, that would take about 20 minutes in Notes...

2. Whenever I mention Notes to anyone here, they shut down-they got tired of me preaching, ranting raving etc. That's no surprise. Whenever I mention Notes to IBM'ers, they invariably either express disgust with it (usually before I realize I'm a former Notes guy) or they stay quiet and just have a look of disgust.

I have never understood the disdain for Lotus Notes as an application platform. It's the most kick-ass thing I've ever seen for flexibility, RAD, cost effectiveness...the list goes on. The mail has been its failing, in my opinion. Now, let me say I haven't used NOtes mail in a long long time, but all that I always heard about how bad Exchange/Outlook is never really proved true. We've never had one virus here that started from mail and we've never had an e-mail outage due to Exchange crashing, getting corrupted, etc.

There are some cool things about Notes mail, but they usually revolve around related applications (or at least they used to- bear in mind I haven't actively been involved with it for about 5 years). I have always thought that if you're using Lotus Notes for mail only, it's a waste.

Why all the fuzz about email market share? Email is not the future, true collaboration is. The problem is that the market for true collaboration is not quite mature yet, so many enterprises are still believing email is what makes them productive.

There are new generations of employees getting into interprise. They wont ask for email, they will ask for social networking tools.

So who want to glue themselves to the email thinking? It´s sooo yesterday and email is a flat market and soon to move down the slope. If you want to be part of the future you go social. And that´s the idea IBM Lotus is pursuing..

the "fuzz" about email is interesting to me because this is the front line of the battle inside of corporations today. people like me who spend all day coding in Notes face the possibility of job loss when another *email* system comes into the enterprise. that's reality today.

"vulcan" may or may not work out. who knows? Notes turning into a corporate version of facebook would, i think, be an improvement over the default experience, even in the latest iteration (8.5.1 as of this writing) of the Notes client (as good as it is compared to previous versions). but that STILL may not be the relevant battle for seats, or servers, or whatever the licensing model will be. it still may be email - and it IS in the company i work at right now.

despite whatever the reality underlying the technology is, despite how incredible the nsf engine is underneath the things going on at the glass, despite the usage patterns in applications all over the enterprise, the battle going on for CIO attention largely revolves around the Outlook client vs the Notes client. they just don't understand much more than that in many cases.

speculation about the future is helpful, but i am more interested in the here and now, the present moment.

but perhaps arne, you have a five year plan we should all be staring in wonder at? ;-) (kidding)

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p.s. nice to see you here arne, i hope you are well. :-)