InformationWeek

Subject: Notes

During the past few months, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with our collective response to the threat of Notes. While the positioning of this product was essentially botched by Lotus during the first several years of its existence, it has nonetheless gained tremendous significance in the eyes of both the industry and our major customers. While it remains the situation that few can tell you what Notes actually is, customers now spontan eously think of Notes when the words "workgroup" or "groupware" are mentioned. What comes to *your* mind when "groupware" is mentioned?

When Notes had less visibility and was being ineffectively marketed, it was much easier for us to dismiss the situation as a temporary phenomenon that we could effectively combat in any of a number of ways, from either our systems or applications efforts. However, Lotus has now gained the moral high ground in the industry with Notes, as clearly demonstrated by the rise of their stock over the course of the year. In the eyes of the press and analysts, this product can do no wrong, even with all of its obvious weaknesses.

The situation now appears to be out of our control; as you well know, virtually every one of our major corporate accounts has cornered one of you and asked how our applications will work with Notes. Due to clever marketing, Lotus has positioned Notes in these customers' minds as a "platform", convincing them that it has some kind of underlying architecture that resembles system software. Although we've estimated that Lotus has only sold about 350,000 copies worldwide, the high acceptance rate of Notes within our major accounts is extremely disturbing. These are the only people who care about systems architecture; if we fail to capture their mindshare, do you have any idea how expensive it will be to regain it?

Between Lotus' mindshare and Novell's network dominance, I am concerned that our enterprise strategy message is being reduced to irrelevance in many accounts. Our success to date has been a result of selling desktop operating systems and desktop applications, but I must reinforce that moving forward, whoever owns the network infrastructure will increasingly own the desktop applications. Customers are increasingly looking toward single-vendor solutions. Since Novell doesn't have applications, this means that Notes could lead to increased sales of cc:Mail and o ther Lotus products. We MUST control the infrastructure moving forward or we will fail to give our applications the leverage that they need for continued success!

But as we learned when launching WFW [Windows for Workgroups], it has proven surprisingly dangerous for us to publicly assail Notes. Notes-bashing is not a sensible solution, first because we can't risk alienating our major accounts who have already embraced the product, and second because we don't currently provide an acceptable alternative. We must take an indirect approach to the problem, positioning it as an isolated application and as complementary to our products. The "one-two punch" of our Anti-Notes message must be 1) to disarm the situation by complimenting Notes on the desktop, demonstrating how well the product integrates with Microsoft desktop applications through standard Microsoft technologies such as OLE and MAPI, and 2) to introduce uncertainty in the customer by making it very clear that our systems infrastructure is much more robust than Notes will ever be, that they don't have any experience with systems or infrastructure, and that there will be no need for their back-end once our systems are in place.

In short, make the customer feel OK that he made both the Notes purchase decision and the Microsoft Office purchase decision, but make him think very carefully about enterprise-wide deployment. If, by these tactics, we can delay enterprise-wide adoption of Notes in our major accounts by a measurable degree, the probabilities will be high that the customer will then force Lotus to rework Notes to work on top of our infrastructure. Thus, while Notes will still exist on the desktop, we will have won the enterprise computing infrastructure. And once Notes is contained on the desktop, it will fail on its own due to its inherent lack of top-end programming capabilities, as compared to our own desktop strategy.

In summary, here are the 10 Anti- Notes Commandments that you and your people should memorize:

I Notes is a good Windows product, and a great OLE application that works exceedingly well with all applications in the Microsoft Office suite. But be careful when using it with Lotus OLE-enabled products, because we're told that they require "back doors" around OLE in order to be useful when used with Notes.

II As an application development environment, Notes is extremely weak. It lacks a true programming language, is not transscriptable, and you have to drop into "C" in order to do anything useful.

III Because of its 16-bit heritage, Notes is rife with 64K limits that show up to the user in very inconvenient ways. The 32-bit version of Notes is simply a recompiled 16-bit version, and still has all of these limitations!

IV Notes isn't architected for the enterprise. Dating back to 1984, it was designed for little workgroups to be connected by phone lines, not for an enterpris e with tens of thousands of users.

V Notes duplicates many of the functions that are in the operating system, such as Mail, Directory and Security. Since the weak point of any secure system is in its management by humans, incompatible duplicate security subsystems and directories result not only in additional management cost, but also weakened security.

VI Lotus as a company doesn't know how to build or support large-scale systems. The back-end of a distributed object store should be built and supported by a company that already supports tens of millions of operating system users, not by a company whose only claim to fame is a spreadsheet.

VII Lotus sells two messaging products, cc:Mail and Notes, that work in completely different and incompatible manners. While they have finally seemed to have learned the art of "marketecture" with their LCS announcement, slides should not be confused with a well-architected product. MAPI [Messaging applications pr ogram interface and the other WOSA [Windows Open Services Architecture] service provider interfaces already have the support of hundreds of third-party developers, and will work flawlessly with EMS [Exchange Messaging Server, an old name for Exchange Server] and all of Microsoft's future operating systems.

VIII The Notes Server has proven to be a pitiful performer on OS/2, but we've heard that it runs extraordinarily well on Windows NT. Because Notes has no built-in support for managing large numbers of servers, we'd suggest that if you plan on deploying Notes servers, you use Windows NT in conjunction with Hermes [the codename for Systems Management Server] in order to do distributed systems management.

IX Cairo [the codename for NT 5.0] has a distributed, replicated object store that is much more robust, efficient, and scaleable than Notes, and in addition it's an open system having been built on DCE RPC. DEC is working with us to ensure that our distributed object technology is portable to other vendors' environments.

X The fact that Lotus is working on many incompatible code streams for Notes on multiple platforms is stretching Lotus past its limits. It has already caused them to miss schedule milestones a number of times, and thus be an unreliable supplier of software. Notes' support of multiple platforms is not unique - all of Microsoft's applications are programmed to the Win/32 API, and will port to Unix, Macintosh, and OS/2 with a simple recompile.

Finally, here's a quick-reference guide that can be used to make potential clients nervous or insecure about Notes, while not alienating them in case they actually do buy Notes:

1. Remember that, in the presence of a client, you should always "be apparently respectful" to Notes, especially if that client is a major account.

2. Always focus on how well Microsoft Office applications work with Notes because Notes was an OLE pioneer, working ve ry closely with Microsoft. Always add that the other Lotus applications were "followers", and have always had abysmal OLE support.

3. Use a number of methods to introduce uncertainty about the "back end" in the customer's mind. The following have been tested and are known to work:

a. They have a directory, but I've heard that it doesn't scale to the size of your organization, and the one in Notes Version 3 was rewritten and has problems.

b. Due to the large Microsoft development community, we already know that virtually every vendor of messaging programs, systems and services are working on Microsoft EMS integration. I'm really not sure yet how Lotus is going to integrate with EMS.

c. The Notes security stuff was good when it was developed, but that was in 1984. And I've heard that they've had some security problems lately - related to the fact that it wasn't in the operating system.

d. The biggest problems people seem to have with Notes is in getting support from Lotus. The integrators who install Notes seem incapable of dealing with any but the simplest of problems, and Lotus itself is very slow at problem resolution - they clearly don't understand what it takes to run a mission-critical enterprise system!

e. The next version of NT, Cairo, has a fully *replicated*, distributed object file system, and I'm not yet sure how Lotus is going to integrate with it. A very large development community is already working with the prerelease development kits. You really should ask Lotus about it.

4. If you're sure that they're going to install Notes (or already have bought it), make sure that you pitch NT as the preferred server environment. Once NT is "in the door", it will be much easier for us to supplant Notes on the back-end with NT Version 2 (Cairo).

"I'm sure that you've heard that the Notes Server is a dog on OS/2, but they've been working with NT for years and it's a sc reamer, especially due to the SMP [symmetrical multi-processor] support."

"Yes, I've heard that the NLM [NetWare Loadable Module] is faster, but it's VERY unstable and can't scale due to the lack of SMP."

"Because Notes is difficult to manage remotely, you can use Hermes to manage your Notes Servers."

Finally, lest you feel that we're only dealing with Notes with words, let me remind you of our current technical efforts, on both the systems side as well as in applications:

SYSTEMS

- EMS will be a combination back-end message router and distributed client/server message store. It will have both public and private relational "message databases", similar to Notes forums, that can be fully replicated with other EMS systems. Message databases are customizable, and front-end tools are included to permit the user to construct "conferencing" and other shared message store applications. It has a tremendously impressive message store, directory, and routing administration tool known as "Mailbeat", public key security, and native X.400 and X.500 support. We will be bundling EMS with every copy of NT Advanced Server and Cairo on a permanent basis starting at first shipment of EMS. You should think of EMS as the "back-end companion" to Chicago [now called Windows 95].

- Chicago will finally eliminate any reason to buy a Macintosh. It will have an impressive object-oriented UI [user interface], integrated networking, integrated VB [Visual Basic], integrated rich text editor, integrated Mail and Messaging, full MAPI 1 support with integrated service providers for out-of-the-box communications with CompuServe, EasyLink, America OnLine, and MicroServe, our new on-line service [now called Microsoft Network]. Chicago will make extensive use of OLE2 in the "shell", creating the appearance of a seamless system. Chicago, combined with integrated mail, VB, and rich text editor, with NT and EMS on the back-end, should give nobody any more *practical* reason to purchase Notes in order to build distributed workgroup applications.

- Windows NT Version 2, or Cairo, is a completely object-oriented back-end. The user-perceivable benefit is to extend the notion of a fully replicated message store back-end, achieved in EMS, to the entire file system. Wherein Chicago was the perfect OLE2 front-end, Cairo will be the perfect OLE2 back-end.

APPLICATIONS

- VBA [Visual Basic Applications Edition]is being enhanced to have full VB functionality, and will be present in all Office applications. Included in this functionality is a set of EMS "controls" that include not only message store and directory traversal, but also routing and delegation controls.

- VBA is being enhanced so that VBA applications themselves are stored inside of "standard containers". As a result, VBA applications can be fully distributed using either the EMS or Cairo replicated message and object stores.

- Office will continue to provide the best OLE2 container support in the industry.

- We will be producing a "Chicago Office" suite to counter any potential Notes-based suite threat. After installation, all Office applications will have apparent "shell-level" integration.

Good luck, and please keep me informed as to your progress.

Bill Return to AuthorITies

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