Ok. Very little has irked me more in the marketing diatribe about the newer products than the hollow "Its standards based, Domino is proprietary" argument. It comes as dogma, to be accepted without further explanation as if it were obvious in the way gravity is obvious but very few people can actually tell you what it is (in fact, it is a perceptive manifestation of the logical effect of curvature in space/time around mass, but that's beside the point).

Here's what they've been trying to say -- or rather, what one person who really did try to say something meant when he said it, and then had it repeated without understanding by a thousand others....

Its not that open standards are inherently better, and its not a specific standard that isn't being followed. Rather, is the open interface that allows a single concept to be used with many other things. In specific, consider this logic.

Fact: The browser is not a rich enough U.I. to satisfy the needs of most users for full scale applications.

Fact: A rich (in comparison to the browser) client side tool can provide a higher level of security and usability

Fact: The Lotus Notes client is a Rich Client

Fact: In addition to Domino, there are many other server back end architectures -- the server part of Client/Server

Fact: The Lotus Notes client can only talk to ONE back end architecture (with small mini tools that use others, admittedly)

Fact: Not every application can or should be built in Domino

Conclusion: There remains a need for a Rich Client for many other kinds of back end architectures, and the Lotus Notes client is not at this time going to be able to perform that role.

That statement, that conclusion, is what the real meaning of "its not standards based" comes down to.

I'm still entirely blind as to what I can and can't say about what I've now been privileged to see in the new Rich Client from IBM. Suffice it to say that I was utterly convinced that it has the potential to become the "IBM Universal Rich Client" -- and act as a fully functional client for Domino, for Lotus Workplace, and also for Tivoli, Rational, and DB2 tools that require a user front end. And in fact, it may be able to do all those things at once.

I think "Standards Based" is very poorly chosen as an explanation of that -- I do think that the inherently open and flexible nature of the Eclipse framework, combined with the yeoman's work I saw from the folks working on making the new Rich Client a valid Lotus Notes client (and it is really getting there, boy oh boy it sure is).

As soon as Terri tells me what I can and can't say in specific, I will say more -- I can hardly wait to tell you about it. In the meantime, the only thing I can say for sure about that old "Standards Based" dogma is that I've run over it with my karma.