Fellow bloggers, Greg Eldred and Glenn Irvine both found this article ahead of me.
What neither pointed out is the ruse Microsoft makes, well Kevin turner makes, that:
"This past year we sold in 4.86 million seats of our collaboration solution – SharePoint, Exchange and Office – into IBM Lotus Notes accounts"
Office is now considered a collaboration product. Right.
So Microsoft can use this product any way they want, what companies do not use Office, any version?
Would like Mr. Turner to provide a better break down when you take Office out of the picture.
For that matter take Exchange out of the picture as well since the likelihood of a Lotus company using Exchange as well is nominal which leaves Sharepoint.
Sharepoint, and the Microsoft people love telling everyone, sells like water at a baseball game in Miami in the summertime. What they don't tell you is every Enterprise Agreement includes CALs for Sharepoint, by default, in addition to other licensing areas which require a CAL, even if you don't use it.
Or as some say, Microsoft gives it away for free and gets you on year 2 licensing maintenance.
Just more FUD from Redmond, and I expected better from Kevin Turner.
Maybe the Lotus Symphony team has some similar numbers we can play with against Microsoft. And it's free, really it is, go get it now and try it, http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa.
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*shrug* Every Notes 8+ sales is a productivity suite sale against Office.
ReplyDeleteThen again, one can legitimately say that Office & Notes compete now, since the prod editors are part of the Notes platform.
I don't see it that way and not sure Lotus/IBM does either. yet.
ReplyDeleteWhen lotus Symphony gains more traction this may be the case. I can't talk for Lotus marketing.
I do not see Notes competing agianst Office just because some tools are embedded in it. Notes has had tables, numbering, columns, and many other word processing functions from day one so I don't see this as a new angle.
Will IBM use it? No idea, should they? I don't know.