Why Domino Dominates
Mat Newman October 5 2010 05:02:39
Why does Domino Dominate ... even 13 years after this poster was released, the content still holds true:History tells us that: No, Netscape was never a dominant player in the groupware market.
Interestingly, somewhere along the way, the original message for Domino got lost. How many analysts still see Domino as a Development environment? How many within IBM still sing that tune?
"When it comes to industrial-strength collaboration, Lotus Notes and Domino... is peerless. It's robust object store, powerful directory, unparalleled security, and rich development environment make it the perfect choice for companies looking for an all-in-one, mission-critical groupware package. You will not go wrong with Notes and Domino." (LAN Times, "Growing Groupware," July 1997)
History also shows us that Microsoft were trying to feed us lines in 1997 as well, again the difference is that analysts didn't believe the FUD back then...
"Microsoft has positioned Exchange as a serious competitor to the mature Lotus Notes. It would have us believe that Exchange is capable of sustaining the messaging requirements of the biggest companies, as well as being a feature-rich application development environment. In other words, it's a bit of a whopper." (InformationWeek United Kingdom, "Time to get it right," November 6, 1997)
We all know that Exchange public folders and forms libraries were never a match for Domino, even Microsoft have been trying to wean their users off them for the last couple of releases, and changed their tune to include Sharepoint as the development environment equivalent of Domino.
Why does Domino Dominate?
I believe the earlier quote sums it up best: "all-in-one". There is nothing like building an application in a single data container, and then hosting that application on a platform that exposes web-services, messaging, directory integration, presence and multi-client access. You don't have to integrate with anything, you don't need to write code to ensure that the pieces are communicating and playing together, it just works.
Compare that "all-in-one" approach to an SQL data store, a web front end surfaced in Sharepoint hosted on IIS, written in .Net (isn't that a joy to code to read/write data back to SQL! NOT), hopefully smart-tagged properly so that Office (Excel, Word or Access) can interpret the content, and then distributed through Exchange, which looks great when viewed in 1280x1024 through Internet Explorer on Windows. Hmmmm.
Yes, Microsoft are still telling everyone 'Whoppers".
And Domino is still all about the Apps. And the fact that an Application can be/is a template so that when someone asks "we need a new application similar to blah-blah that does...."
Sure boss. File-Application-New... Just give me 20 minutes and I'll have it ready for you!
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