Richard
Right Mick. I think the overall conference opening was designed to re-assure the people that come for Notes/Domino content--far and away the vast majority of attendees at Lotusphere. They had an appearance by Ray Ozzie (the inventor of Notes), a retrospective on the 20-year history of Lotus Notes, and they even trotted out Mike Zisman (former Lotus Executive VP). I think all this was designed to restore confidence in the platform after two years of pretty mangled messages about the future of Notes/Domino.

It's also interesting to look at the conference theme "Envision Decisions", and recall what John Cleese spoke of. After trying to be "reasonably offensive" to the audience, John settled into the main theme of his keynote address, which is that studies have shown creative/intelligent people tend to take longer to make decisions. He suggested that whenever possible, it pays to stall and take as long as possible to make a difficult decision. I don't believe this was an accident.

If you think about the situation most Notes shops are in, they've been a little bit antsy for the last couple of years about having to (potentially) give up a vital piece of their information infrastructure. This year's Lotusphere was a breath of fresh air. Ambuj used the term "investment protection" and said, twice, "there's no two lane highway." It's great to see IBM/Lotus "take the gloves off" and talk about some of the positive sales numbers over the last year compared to Microsoft.

Mick
That's not all; Ambuj said he's set his team a target of 200 million seats, but was a bit coy as to when. I spoke later with Ken Bisconti, VP of Product Management for Workplace, Portal and Collaboration at Lotus, who told me it was a target to aim at over the next couple of product cycles; which I'd take to mean the 2007/2008 timeframe. Given that the 118 million figure is basically all Notes seats that have been accrued over 15 years, another 82 million collaboration seats in two or three years isn't a trivial target to aim at.

Richard
You're right--I noticed the lack of a target deadline as well. It reminds me of the 100 million target that Jeff Papows (Lotus General Manager before Al Zollar) laid out so many Lotuspheres ago.

Mick
What new products will there be to aim at that target? In reality, there was little new-new announced; what was announced were updates and clarity of previous plans. And clarity, particularly after the confusion at Sphere 2003 (See DominoPower February 2003 at http://www.dominopower.com/tocs/issue200302.html), was needed. For starters, the old two-lane highway from 2003 is well and truly buried. Ambuj claimed in conversation the message now is just as it was then. Well, maybe so, but boy is it differently--and better--articulated.

Richard
Well, I don't know about buried Mick, our readers can review the Opening General Session at https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?source=sw-pprod05&S_PKG=Lotusphere05 and listen to Ambuj say there's no more two-track strategy. When you look at the details of what's coming from Lotus in the next few years, there does seem to be a couple of different main thrusts to what IBM is promising to deliver. We'll cover that later in this article.