Domino on the decline?

I know that we are Notes zealots for the most part, but this article is WAY off in my opinion. Apparently Ed and Rocky agree with me as well.

First, it says Domino is on the decline, which I disagree with. I’m seeing more and more Notes jobs being posted every week. Also, there are far less unemployed Notes folks in our user group. Notes has been committed to for version 7, 8, and 9. How is that on the decline? Here some some interesting quotes as well:

I feel embarrassed when a user asks me why can’t they sort the Sent folder by file size — they want to delete sent e-mails with large attachments — or why can’t they launch an attachment by double clicking on it,

This was by a guy named Sabir. First of all, YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR EMAIL TEMPLATE! How hard is it to add a Size column? And to top it off, Sent does sort by size in ND6. The answer to the second question is simple, VIRUSES. Just double-clicking to open is more reckless than double clicking and then choosing what to do. Using VIEW can even protect you in many instances. That extra click cannot be a deciding factor in how people perceive Notes, criminey.

In a single word, how would one describe the mood of the Lotus user community? Depressed.

I’m happier than I have ever been in the Notes world. The product is more useful and more extensible than ever, and I don’t see that going away any time soon. If the user community is depressed, I don’t see it. One company is moving away from Notes and Domino despite the following however.

For example, the Notes group recently did a complete redesign of one of our Web sites. The time of delivery of design to live was just two weeks with one person working part time,” he said. “Our corporate Web site took three people six months to redesign. The only difference? The first site was developed in Domino, and the corporate site uses Microsoft products.

This is the major value of Notes. How any true IT Executive can not see the value in that is beyond me.

I do agree with the underlying sentiment in the article that the Notes client isn’t as “sexy.” though. I think cleaning up the UI and making it a little more Fisher-Price in nature would sway some folks out there.

Also, I don’t see why Lotus hasn’t been more agressive in attacking Microsoft in their advertising. Hitting them on uptime and virus propogation alone could be really powerful. Lotus advertising could still use some work. Sorry Ed. 🙂