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Why so negative now? Domino & Notes are on the UPSWING for a change.
By Andrew Pollack on 03/06/2009 at 08:55 PM EST
I've been too busy with travel and work to be keeping up on many blogs of late. Over the last few days, a few people have pinged me just to tell me about this person or that person disintegrating in a puff of self righteous smoke.
I don't get it. You guys stuck through a period of years when even IBM couldn't be convinced of the value of their own product line -- and now you come apart? Not seeing what you wanted in version 8.5 on the client? I get that. IBM decided to put most of the focus of 8.5 on the server. That's come a long way. The client is catching up and so is designer. You've seen the tech previews and you know that's the truth.
I see some grand old wizards of this product line upset because things didn't go their way -- and letting that justify a constant background level of negative spin.
Here's something to consider:
The Lotus Notes Client is a trailing indicator of what's going on at IBM. I mean that in the same way that unemployment figures are considered a trailing indicator of the current economic situation. By the time you get the figures, the situation has moved on. Lets look at some of the leading indicators instead:
Leading Indicators:
1. IBM Lotus has continued to grow the Design Partner program -- they're actually taking input from that program into the client. This is resulting in cleaner, faster builds and sometimes even a few priority changes (admittedly not always the ones we most want).
2. We've just got our hands (officially) on the biggest server release in a decade with Domino 8.5. Now attention is turned to the client.
3. We've seen previews of the LS editor, the Java editor, and other fun tools in the 8.5.x timeframe.
4. Every IBM Lotus BP that I've asked is busy right now. There's work being done even in this terrible economy.
5. Its nearly spring.
something that does not exist.
small complaints about the 8.5 client. To be fair there is also alot of good
stuff ie xpages.
Serving you count that as negative?
True, there is the posting from Wild Bill and Duffbert talked about 100.000
seats going over to Exchange some days ago.
Apart from that I see dozens of articles hailing xPages including an awesome
tutorial and the usual praise IBM, everything is great stuff. They are all
positive. And there even is the fudbuster nonsense that try to do IBM marketing
and normally reads like pure advertising.
There is one exeption. If vowe writes about IBM it is almost never positive.
But vowe is not the Yellow Bubble (and sure he does not want it to be).
I think if you count every IBM related topic on Planet Lotus and seperate it
into Pro and Con you will probably get a result that tops every election in the
People's Republic of China. Sorry but to me this still looks odd.
instructions for gadgets.
Personally, I don't care about gadgets. Am a proud owner of the cheapest nokia
cellphone I was able to find. But I guess vowe is far more effective in this
than in writing about stuff a wee bit less straight forward.
making it up out of whole cloth.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've watched some fairly dumb statements get
blown up in ways that end up spreading misinformation. What I'm trying to say
here, is that things are pretty good in the Notes/Domino community -- even if
they're not exactly what I'd like them to be.
If I wanted to make something up, I could do better.
As far as what gets said on vowe.net? I like Volker Weber and even respect him
-- I don't always like what he says as "vowe" on vowe.net, but it's his
(non)blog. He likes to use it to stir the pot now and then. I enjoy doing
that too. If the people feeding him rumor were a bit more honest (maybe even
with themselves) about their motives for doing it, his content would be
better.
All the same, vowe.net isn't the root of any controversy. Its just a mirror
held up that shows what one subgroup has on its mind. That's useful even when
its annoying. I'm more confused as to why such a group seems to see this as a
particularly bad time in the life of the product and its community. As I
said, the economy overall is for shit, but in our community people are busy and
there's plenty of work to be done.
humor.
heard about but haven't had time to follow.
negative postings. Maybe we don't agree on what is a negative post, maybe they
are there and I ignore them. As many I follow Planetlotus, have some Google
alerts and read notes.net and atnotes.de (and some more).
From my opinion they are 98 % positive.
It is how I wrote it. I don't that much negative posts and to be clear I don't
miss them either. But maybe everyone reads what he wants to read.
said it. Ni!
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are negative, the majority of Notes experts I know are very positive.
Perhaps some have a tough time keeping up with all those new features, but in a
positive sense...
For example, my collegue Stephan (who was also at Entwicklercamp) is now *very*
excited about XPages... he started working with that right on the train on the
way back :-)