Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Why customers think Lotus is Legacy Software!

because they get emails like this from IBM about there products

Notice the 1995 era html table


Now here is an example from cdw, not the greatest but not bad either


3 comments:

Brett H said...

Damn straight skippy...

Joel said...

There is also the fact that IBM treats it as such in its marketing decisions. Where is the aggressive sell on all the new capabilities? They tell people xPages is great. xPages is the future of Domino. IT managers don't care. They want e-mail, social apps, instant messaging, and a platform they can build on easily. IBM doesn't market Domino aggressively to such people who, instead, turn to PHP and simply hire a company in India to build a custom solution (or purchase all the parts they need and hire someone to mash it together).

Oh, and let's not forget the big problem with xPages adoption: the who cares, factor. It has a learning curve. It has one book out on developing with it, which was released years after the product came on the market. It has, for a shop not currently on Domino, no value-added reason to purchase the product. The IDE is still not polished enough for a product of the caliber needed. If a company doesn't have a Domino infrastructure, xPages doesn't encourage them to invest in one. If they do, it doesn't encourage them to throw a lot of time/money into migrating their existing Domino applications.

The big problem with xPages, as I see it, for Domino developers, is that it forces developers to learn a new technique for obtaining the same thing they already have, and does not significantly improve the process of developing modern production quality web applications for an established programming unit (or person). For new developers, there is no incentive to learn it or Domino as a whole platform.

David Leedy said...

Joel,
No one can debate IBM's marketing efforts... but I thik you're way off base with the rest.
Sure there's a learning curve to XPages. When new technology isn't there? But the learning curve isn't too bad because it's based on things like HTML/CSS/JavaScript/JAVA. there are things that we could really never use in the Notes Client all that much. So at least now the language of XPages is the same language as almost everything else.
And what do you get for this learning? You get to do things you couldn't easily do on traditional domino web dev, and could absolutely NOT do in notes client dev. You get things like repeat controls and session scope variables. You get better data binding and now even SVN integration.
So yeah... other platforms have had this stuff. But now you can do it on domino and arguable create apps quicker and better then you can on other platforms because the good things about Domino like readers and authors fields, agents, ACL control, replication, etc.. are still there.
So in my opinion there's a high incentive to learn XPages if you're a Notes guy, or Domino itself, of you're not.

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