If you have come to the DominoPower Web site looking for information about playing the game of dominos, you're probably already a bit confused by my article. Sorry about that. Some of us computer folk are not best known for being friendly or helpful, but just to disprove our stereotype, the site you're looking for is http://www.worlddomino.com, and there's still in time to sign up for the World Domino Championship in Alabama. Just be thankful our marketing guys aren't running that event or you'd find it suddenly combined with the World Snakes & Ladders competition and the Pan-American Hula-Hoop finals to make one big festival called Unrelated Leisure ActivitySphere. Good luck and thanks for stopping by.

Okay, so just the Lotus Notes people are left reading this, I hope. Usually my articles for DominoPower contain more C code than English. But I guess, with the prospect of another essay on using pointers to functions to construct generic view scanning routines with the Lotus Notes C API Toolkit, the editor decided to take pity on you all and let me write something original and insightful on the state of our industry. So, Lotus Domino, where is it all going then?

IBM executive shoots own foot
If you have more than a passing interest in industry news you must have seen some rather disturbing stories about the future of Lotus Domino earlier this year. Maybe you saw "Lotus to address developer concerns" at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,29795,00.asp or "Users irked by Domino moves" at http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0311lotus.html, swiftly followed by "Lotus Downplays IBM Exec's Domino Remarks" at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,11490,00.asp. These articles were discussed endlessly on a number of on-line forums, and the whole issue began to take on an element of farce resembling a Monty Python sketch: "Excuse me sir, is this a ten minute argument or the full half hour?" For many of us who make a living out of these Lotus products, some of the outlandish quotes made by IBM staff were a cold shower on an already cool marketplace. This one in eWeek certainly got my attention: