Fork in the road?
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate Microsoft. I’ve made a good living supporting Microsoft servers and desktops and I really like a lot of what they do. I’ve been an Exchange administrator as well as a Notes/Domino one. As such I’m also a Microsoft business partner in my little web-design side business. Today I got an email notification of what they are calling their Competitive Tools and Resources event series. Here is the opening salvo:
Today’s organizations that own Lotus Domino or Novell Netware have reached a “fork in the road” in the future of their collaboration platform. According to the Radicati Group, “Only 21% of the Lotus Domino customers surveyed are planning to deploy IBM Workplace.” For Novell Netware users their operating system is coming under intense pressure from Linux with Novell’s acquisition of SuSe!
This is so misleading in so many ways that I can’t even do anything more than chuckle. First, quoting Radicati? Please… Second, people are dropping Netware because Novell bough SuSe? Where is the logical connection? And where is the “fork in the road?” for people using Domino? As far as I know Domino is going to be around for awhile. Didn’t 7 just ship? Also, what does the fact that only 21% of customers plan on implementing Workplace have to do with anything? Just because they aren’t planning on Workplace doesn’t mean that they ARE planning on migrating away from Lotus. I just don’t get it…
February 23, 2006 @ 3:19 pm
You know what’s sadder?? A sales person in my company used the same quote and sent it off to a bunch of our Notes clients. *sigh* We’ve been in clean up mode since…
February 24, 2006 @ 7:32 am
The 21% quote is the one that Chris Byrne takes to task on his “Fighting FUD” list. Only 32 customers surveyed, survey conducted on radicati.com (more like a poll than a survey), and that means that few lotus customers ever surfed on by.
February 24, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
@Ed, but I think that the main point here is that there is a direct mail piece being sent out, quoting faulty “survey” results as the focal point. We know that this isn’t right, but to the people that have gotten it, it looks very convincing. How many people will take the time to investigate this claim? Based on Kevin’s post, not many.
February 24, 2006 @ 1:50 pm
There’s unfortunately nothing I can do about it – Radicati published those numbers, as invalid as they are. MS must be able to sleep well at night knowing they are quoting such BS, but it’s not their report –they’re just quoting it.