What can we all learn from this
One of the wisest people I know is DominoPower Senior Technical Editor Mick Moignard. Mick weighed in on this issue with some valuable insights.

Mick's notes
You were right to run the piece, regardless of the comments about "DominoPower journalism" on Ben's blog. I might disagree with Ron (actually some of it I agree with, see later), but I defend his right to say what he feels and yours to run it. DominoPower is an articles and opinion magazine more than a news product, and there's no issue with opinions you might not agree with. But he should have disclosed his commercial interest in the Sun stuff.

I saw the comment about DominoPower advertising and connections to articles. I can say for sure that what I write is determined by me, and has no connection to any advertising that you may have booked or be trying to book. If I write an article that praises or damns a particular product or service, it's because that's my opinion on that product or service and is unaffected by your advertising bookings -- which I know nothing about. I do get occasional contribution requests from you and even less frequent editorial guidance, but I have never seen or felt any advertiser-generated influence from DominoPower on what I write. You can quote me on that if need be.

SaaS may kill Notes, but I doubt it. I'm not sure that email commoditisation will kill it either, but Lotus are clearly hedging that bet, in offering Notes as an application development and runtime platform for client and Web, and not just an email engine. I have some strong thoughts on how effective that is, and on what application/business scenarios Notes should be aimed at, but that's not the point here.

Notes is as likely to be killed by an infrastructural change or a business paradigm change as it is to be killed by another piece of software: even more so, I'd suggest. Look at what the LAN did for conventional mainframe-based terminal services and batch operations, and what the PC-based word processor program did for the typewriter and the dedicated word processing machines. Look at how the Internet has disintermediated many companies.

Indeed, if anything is going to kill Notes, it's our kids and how they communicate, and the knock-ons from that, and this will take Exchange and a lot of other things with it, too. They don't use email any where near as much as we do; instead they use a rich mixture of SMS texting, blogs, Facebook, some twittering, MSN and so on, with a bit of email on the side.

Their different hit on communications is as strange to us as ours was to our parents. My Dad never understood or coped with the fact that I don't write letters. Indeed, look at how we communicate has changed the Post Office's business, from carrying information to carrying things, and how Internet protocols have trashed the circuit switching paradigm that the telcos made their money from.

Look at how the telcos were also damaged by the cellular telephone. Lok at how most of the cellular networks are operated by new companies and not by telcos. Vodafone, for example, was started as an offshoot of Racal Vodac here in the UK.