I get a sick kind of pleasure (and I don't know why) about the fracas between Radicati and Ferris analysts various Lotus stalwarts over the content of a recent Radicati report that disses IBM's Workplace strategy and supports Microsoft's market approach.

What has happened is an enormous mess:

• Ed Brill, a Lotus executive, posted a link to the report on his weblog, and his readers began reading it, and commenting on it.
• A Radicati analyst (or analysts) posted responses to the criticisms under a psuedonym.
• Various folks uncovered the ID of the Radicati employee, and traced the fact that the same email addresses were used to demand that anti-Radicati bloggers should be fired, including Ed Brill. Various IBM excs recieved such emails.

Sean Gallagher

[Lotus Bloggers and Analysts Brawl, Bogus Postings Alleged]

Radicati said she was surprised by the harshness of the initial response to the white paper. "I'm pretty appalled by it," she said. "We'd never seen the discussion stoop to this level [on blogs] before, particularly the viciousness in which things were discussed."

The white paper, a summary of five recently published reports from The Radicati Group, was critical of IBM Lotus' handling of its roadmap for its Domino messaging server and the upcoming IBM Workplace collaboration platform, calling it an "end-of-life" strategy for Domino and predicting that "many Domino users will migrate away from the platform."

Radicati said the analysis was based on surveys and interviews with corporate executives with purchasing decision power, and an analysis of the information provided by IBM and Microsoft.

"The people who are writing on blogs—those are Lotus diehards, IT managers and midlevel people who've built their career on Lotus," Radicati said. "They're not necessarily the people who hold the purse strings. I think that's where some of the disconnect is."

This affair provides an almost textbook example of the sort of grassroots marketing support that vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems hope to gain by projecting their corporate presence into the blogging world.

At the same time, it also shows how complicated that interaction can be. To be successful, a company's community relationship should be built on honesty and trust—or at least on trust.

I am almost afraid to point out the various white papers I wrote last year, agreeing with the Radicati views on IBM's confused marketing message relative to Microsoft. In February November 2003 [Ed Brill's comment led me to correct this], I wrote First Take: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, where I said the following:

Undoing Sametime: The Battle for the Enterprise

In past years, IBM Lotus Sametime was the solution to beat for enterprise instant messaging, but Sametime is undergoing a wholesale restructuring within a larger IBM product family. Built on the reputation and functionality of the Lotus Notes/Domino platform, Lotus established a leadership position for enterprise real-time collaboration, both instant messaging and web conferencing, with its Sametime product.

As a part of IBM’s move to obsolete the venerable Notes/Domino technology, Lotus Sametime – as well as other collaborative technologies pioneered by Lotus – is being repositioned as a component of WebSphere, IBM’s enterprise application platform. IBM has been reorganizing all collaborative technologies around WebSphere, to the point where Lotus has become little more than a brand under the WebSphere umbrella.

Sametime is being reformulated as two products, Lotus Instant Messaging and Lotus Web Conferencing. Note that nearly all the sophisticated real-time communication capabilities are only available in Lotus Web Conferencing. These include audio and video chat, application sharing, and other advanced features that are native to Live Communications Server.

One element of confusion surrounding IBM’s plans for real-time collaboration is the future of the two products that have been refactored from Sametime. While they are currently sold through a single license, IBM’s is positioning the two as independent products. In the future Lotus Workplace, who knows how they will be licensed or managed? IBM is unclear on this matter.

At the beginning of 2003, Sametime was clearly the market leader for enterprise real-time collaboration. However, in the past ten months IBM has worked to reformulate Sametime as a WebSphere component and is quickly moving away from the Notes/Domino platform. These activities have been the major focus of SameTime development in 2003, instead of providing new functionality.

Consider that in the same period Microsoft has brought the Live Communications Server to market, integrated with the Office 2003 release, and providing very attractive features and functionality when compared with SameTime.

In particular, IBM seems to have turned its back on the desktop, and the productivity benefits for information workers that arise through real-time desktop collaboration. WebSphere provides a portal-style integration strategy for IBM customers, and IBM seems committed to getting its customers to turn their backs on the “in-context” collaboration that naturally emerges from integration of real-time collaboration with Office tools. Even at the January 2003 Lotusphere conference, established and knowledgeable Lotus business partners were questioning the WebSphere strategy, and conjecturing that some of the technological lead that Sametime had over its competitors would be lost as the result of IBM’s strategic priorities taking precedence over product enhancement. It looks now, ten months later, as if the discouraged business partners that I spoke with were right, at least with regard to the impact that the WebSphere strategy would have on Sametime’s technological leadership.

So, although I would seem to be speaking on the side of the malefactors in this recent analyst cat fight, I have to agree with the thrust of Radicati's analytic sentiment, if not their blogging etiquette.

[Pointer from Shared Spaces]

[7 Aug 2004 -- Note: I have struck out the references to Ferris, since I was informed by Michael Sampson that it wasn't Ferris folks, but others, including him (at Shared Space) that got all spun up in this thing.]

[7 Aug 2004 -- Also note: Ed Brill suggests that my comments regarding IBM's 'retreat from the desktop' are, at best, out of date, and at worst, simply wrong. I am open to persuasion! So I hope to interview Ed later this month, and get the walk-through on IBM's Workspace strategy and client technology.]