Leadership By Numbers

11 - Jack, great post. I'm enjoying the discussion.

Though I've spent my career developing mostly for Lotus Notes this past year I've taken a deep dive into Open Source including evaluated and working with a wide variety of platforms and tools. The people I've met on these endeavors know nothing about Notes without except for buying into the whole Notes is dead myth. At the same time many in the OS community agree that there still isn't a great email client out there either commercial, Open Source, web based or desktop. Making it easier for them to test drive Notes 8.5 would be huge. Now that Notes is Eclipse based, skills to develop on the Notes platform are more mainstream. Winning over a bigger chunk of the developer community would go a long way towards expanding the Lotus platform.

10 - @Ed, Why do you feel the need to make Notes@Home available in 26 languages? If that's a pre-cursor to a marketing idea getting a green-light, that's severely limiting.

I've seen your viral video postings, and I don't recall them being offered in alternate languages, yet they're still effective in reaching a wide audience.

9 - Rather than duplicate responses between two blogs, I just responded once here:

{ Link }

Bruce's blog entry is entitled "This is what IBM Lotus needs to (figure out how to) do". I am sorry Jack about the awkward cross-postings and not sure if I have violated some protocol on blog commenting.

8 -

7 - I posted a similar response for Roland at Bruce Elgort's blog, so should make sure that it is clear here that I read his reply.

The role play doesn't address the core issue which is that the kind of marketing you look for is very expensive and must be considered in the context of running Notes as a profitable business. I made this point once already and you and Kevin both said basically "but the awareness is worth it". This is not the way that IBM writes a business plan and there are many variables that have to be considered. I mentioned a few of them in my first comment, such as the fact that we distribute Notes in 26 languages all over the world. Support is another factor. I could go on with many more.

I have said before that Symphony provides a great opportunity for the in-home awareness you describe, and we add things like Lotusscript support to Symphony precisely so that partners can build Notes-like applications which run in this environment. There is more than one potential approach. I have seen enough data and considered all sorts of market input before making my statement about web-based mail being the trend today, it's not at all just "gut instinct". So let's find ways to add real value, not just copycat already-existing free tools in the market.

6 - @3 Ed - Thanks for the interaction. You challenged me to justify a FREE Notes@Home which no doubt would require some investment in development to simplify the setup (new wizards, training vids, etc) as well as some marketing (though it could just coattail on the Symphony budget). In other words, like Jack was challenging us in his post, "What's the viable business model of investing in a free product?" After all, if Notes@Home is as cool as we both agree it is for applications beyond email, wouldn't it be better to charge for it?

First, I think Kevin (@4) took the words out of my mouth as to who the target market for this would be. Thanks Kevin.

Let me answer this further. Let's first establish and agree that you're not concerned about margin erosion from giving away a product to someone who is already paying for it. How many Notes licenses does IBM sell that are not associated with a Domino server? I am sure there are some, but not enough to lose sleep over. If we agree on that, we can move on to establish how a free Notes@Home client would energize IBM's business model.

The goal of a FREE Notes@Home client is simply to take Notes mainstream. The ROI of mainstreaming a product is that exposure breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds loyalty and loyalty results in a solid revenue stream, especially on support maintenance contracts.

Lotus' core business is selling CALS and server licenses to large corporations (and now making a play to VSB via Foundations). From reading EdBrill.com for years, I know you'll agree that a common barrier to overcome in corporate sales (e.g stopping migration to another platform) is to get beyond the politics and focus on the technical benefits where Notes Domino excels. That barrier sometimes cannot be overcome nor do you always have an opportunity to address it (hands over ears). It often goes like this...Let me role play a CxO that is now with his umteenth company we'll call "n":

[Role Play] "I am a power user and believe in productivity tools. At company(n-1) I used product XYZ. I am familiar with it. Its not that its the greatest, but its functional. I also used XYZ at company(n-2). Fortunately, during that in-between period before I came to company(n) I continued to use product XYZ at home, painlessly maintaining my valuable lists of contacts, my calendar, and my other lists that help me cope, remember, and be productive, both personally and professionally [this is a GTD user that doesn't believe in the artificial separation of home & work systems]. Now I am at company(n) we'll be switching to product XYZ because its proven to keep me productive through jobs and in-between as well" [\Role Play]

Even if one realizes their tool has some unpleasant quirks, people like to become proficient in one tool, at work and at home, and use it everywhere possible (do you know how many MSN clients I seen running in system trays at work?). Its the old devil you know is better than the devil you don't know argument.

So, the margin opportunity for IBM to invest in a FREE Notes@Home client is to create a better affinity through familiarity. In the longer term it can potentially reduce that political sales barrier. Also, think of the opportunities of hooking up an new generation of pre-corporate users who are just working their way through higher eduction and will be the CxO's of tomorrow.

[BTW just to be clear, when I say Notes@Hime I mean the same standard client just improved with more consumer-oriented wizards, Help, import/export options, and a no-ID option for POP mail.]

5 - @4 Kevin, "The point here is not to make money directly, but to build brand awareness and affinity."

I hear this a lot, and I know that it's something that the community is desirous of. I also know that I have a huge business to run for IBM, and that the expense associated with being successful with the idea of brand awareness and affinity (in other words, doing the real job and not half-way) in the 26 languages we ship in and the worldwide markets is very, very expensive. The shareholders are desirous of brand equity and awareness, too, which is why we do do things like Symphony. But I would like to deliver that in a way that is both smart in the market and fiscally prudent. I don't agree that e-mail client services are the way to do that in 2009.

4 - @Ed - Notes@Home would not be an attempt to peal away tens of millions of truly "consumer" users from web-based email. It would appeal to power users, freelancers, church volunteers, etc. who might already be looking at Symphony. Adding Notes to that mix along with a bunch of simple templates for things like invoicing, mail merge/label printing, and other purposes would be very useful to a lot of people. Making it easy to "trade up" to a full license and put some custom db on a hosted Domino server to share with a partner or colleague is also worth considering.

The point here is not to make money directly, but to build brand awareness and affinity. The payoff comes from the fact that many of the folks who would find this appealing have day jobs in bigger companies, memberships in professional associations, and a myriad of other avenues to transmit the message that "Notes is great".

Of course you don't want to expend huge resources to customize the Notes client to fit this concept, but if it's worth the trouble to offer Symphony with Notes, the converse should be true as well.

I wrote these ideas up in more detail recently on someone else's blog. If anyone remembers where please tell me .

3 - @2 "Notes@Home is really cool if you get your mind beyond it just being email which is pretty much the case at work too isn't it?"

So if you and I agree on this, why would I put any energy into #1 and parts of #3/5 on your list? I see absolutely no benefit to investing in Notes as a personal (non-corporate) e-mail client at a time when consumers are increasingly turning to the web for personal e-mail.

I completely agree with the general thought and a lot of what you say in #5 and #7. Part of the reason I pushed for Eric Mack and David Allen's session at Lotusphere is to communicate emphasis of this notion of personal productivity. We have to do a lot more, and will.

2 - Great points Jack. I'll home in on the free use of Notes@Home concept.

IBM seems allergic to the idea of non-corporate Notes users. They disbelieve that what users like at home WILL influence the tools they'd like to use at work. Hence the primary advantage Outlook has enjoyed. The critics of Notes' legacy clients of course will say, "Why would they want to?" I think the evolution of the Notes Client in the version 8 stream (standard eclipse version) has finally dealt a death blow to that old horse.

IBM needs to consider a new business model for the Notes client taking into account that consumer usage does affect workplace decisions. Here's some suggestions for reengineering the Notes client and business model:

(1) free personal use with POP/SMTP mail. No Notes ID required (just eliminate the need for an ID in non-corporate usage).

(2)a paid license IS required for communication with a Domino server (and a Notes ID)

(3)Make Notes an integral component of the Symphony Suite (yes, we think of Symphony as a component of Notes, but really they are all just parallel Eclipse plug ins). Just to be clear, this does *not* mean open-sourcing Notes.

(4) Update the import export interoperability for Notes to access the file formats actually used by consumers (drop wks format, export to ODF without programming).

(5) Add better wizards to make the config of Notes easier for non-Notes professionals. Make sure POP access to GMail is one of the options (regretably I still can only send, not receive Gmail via Notes 8.5 beta though some others claim it works).

(6) Built in video tutorials that show users some of the great things you can use Notes for besides email. Like the built-in goodness of being able to create your own local databases and use it as a digital scrapbook to organize and search all your electronic information in amazing ways. The new Notebook application in Notes 8.5 should be promoted. There are just a whole host of swiss-army uses for Notes, even at home that are neglected because Notes has been positioned as a corporate tool alone.

(7) Create a suite of NTF's that would be considered useful for personal use. e.g. organize your music collection, DVD's, even your physical filing system can be indexed in Notes. For example, I can electronically search for a folder in Notes (e.g. which folder has my birth certificate), determine the folder number, then walk over to the file cabinet and retrieve the folder in 2 seconds.

Notes@Home is really cool if you get your mind beyond it just being email which is pretty much the case at work too isn't it?

1 - you are here by banned from the computing and business world for talking complete sense and actually making a suggestion/plan that will work