It seems as if IBM is mounting the comeback of Lotus. According to this article, US Bank has decided to get rid of SharePoint and go with the Lotus platform:
Furthermore, IBM has dictated that all its employees have 10 days to migrate their data from Microsoft Office to Symphony.
As many of us out there, I used Lotus regularly at clients back in the late ’90’s, and it wasn’t uncommon to see Lotus developers at my clients’ sites. People talked about how flexible the product was. However, it could be so complicated that it seemed as if it never caught on for more than e-mail, and it was clunky e-mail client at best.
Once Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes, came on board with Microsoft as its Chief Technology Officer, the death knoll tolled for Lotus. I was often told that Lotus was a “dead” product and that IBM was putting no more development effort into the product. Once SharePoint 2007 was released, it seemed as if the power of Lotus was largely realized in IBM’s competition.
Quite honestly, as someone who makes her living off of SharePoint, I don’t spend a lot of time learning to use other products. (I often say, there’s no point for a carpenter to learn how to lay bricks, unless he wants to become a brick layer.) However, several months ago I was re-introduced to Lotus by an IBM rep in the area. He very strongly insisted that Lotus is anything but dead, and in fact, IBM is in fact dumping huge amounts of money into the product. (No doubt, with the popularity of SharePoint, IBM realized there’s clearly a market for its product.)
Although I have been brought into more than one client to replace legacy Lotus apps, I wonder how many people in the next year or two will be brought in to replace SharePoint apps with Lotus apps.