IBM In Denial Over Lotus Notes - Forbes.com - 0 views
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The marketing folks in IBM's Lotus division are starting to sound like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who insists he's winning a fight even as he loses both arms and legs: "'Tis but a scratch," the Black Knight declares after one arm is lopped off. "Just a flesh wound," he says after losing the other. "I'm invincible!" The same goes for IBM's (nyse: IBM - news - people ) Lotus, which keeps declaring victory even as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) carves it up.
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Want to know the real reason why IBM and Microsoft are going at it hammer and tong over document formats? Here it is. Lotus Notes is getting clobbered by the Exchange/SharePoint juggernaut.
The article is old, but the point is well taken. Today the Exchange/SharePoint juggernaut i sover 65% marketshare. IBM is struggling to protect the Lotus Stack against an impossible foe.
The thing is, Microsoft E/S will ALWAYS have better integration with the MSOffice - Outlook desktop monopoly base (550 M and counting). Most of this "integration" is due to the high fidelity exchange of documents in Microsoft's proprietary XML mode known as MS-OOXML. Forget the charade that MS-OOXML is an open standard called Ecma 376. MSOffice and infamous XML Compatibility Pack Plug-in do not implement Ecma 376. The Pack implements MS-OOXML.
One key differnece between MS-OOXML and Ecma 376 us that MS-OOXML is infused with the Smart Tags components. These are for metadata, data binding, data extraction, workflow, intelligent routing and on demand re purposing of docuemnt components. In effect, MS-OOXML :: Smart Tags combines with proprietary .NET Libraries, XAML and soon enough Silverlight to replace the entire span of W3C Open Internet Technologies.
Can you say "HTML"?
Okay, so why does this matter to IBM and the future of Lotus Notes?
The end game of the document format wars is that of a stack model that converges desktop, server, devices and web information systems. The MS Stack uses MS-OOXML as the primary transport of accelerated content/data/multi media streams running across the MS Stack of desktop, server, device and web application systems. It's the one point of extreme interoperability.
It's also a barrier that no non MS applicatio or service can penetrate or interoperate with except on terms Microsoft dictates.