LinkedIn Question : What is the future of Lotus Notes

As  LinkedIn user, I see questions to ‘ the network’  passing by every now and then. Yesterday Alan Lepofsky, as ‘interim Ed Brill’  🙂 highlighted the question ‘ What is the future of Lotus Notes ? ‘.

… There is a new question on LinkedIn about the future of Lotus Notes.  Great timing considering the upcoming release of Notes/Domino 8.   How better to answer the question than by delivering code!

Now of course our competition has taken it upon themselves to turn this into a debate about Lotus versus the rest of the IBM Software Group and bring up terms like Workplace, essentially trying to shift the conversation away from the original question. …

Source: What is the future of Lotus Notes
Originally published on Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:16:57 GMT by Alan Lepofsky

As often happens on this topic, this quesions is turning into a debate (48 answers and counting). Although Alan is right about the fact that the debate takes the original question out of context, I do question his comment : ‘ Lotus versus the rest of the IBM Software Group and bring up terms like Workplace’. And here I was thinking Lotus=IBM, because that is where the real synergy would be you would say.

Mirosoft is often hammered by the competition for its ‘moving parts’  being the number of different products that form the communication / collaboration platform. Although there may be challenges in Microsoft’s approach, the strategy and direction is integration and this has resulted in a major competitive platform over the last 5 years. In IBM’s case the discussion often is brought back to ‘only’  the products in the Lotus Notes Domino ‘family’  it can be confusing.