Lotus Position

I'm soooo glad I skipped Lotusphere. As IBM has slowly digested Lotus over the past few years, there's been less and less reason to go. Okay, so Lotus has apparently fully embraced J2EE (a year late and a product cycle short). BFHD*. And Sametime has a third of “conferencing marketshare”–in a space where most people use freeware, that's not exactly something that translates into a revenue stream.

I just got off of Notes recently. While it's only marginally worse than Exchange (which I also refuse to use now–I have all my mail forwarded to my own POP account), it was just too hard, apparently, for my IT department to support it. And nobody ever really used the document databases for anything, because users never learned how to and were never given publish permissions anyway.

Notes and Sametime, et al, are now dinosaurs. POP/IMAP/SMTP mail still rules the messaging roost, and P2P tools like Groove are starting to supplant Notes and other “groupware” environments, mostly because they don't require IT intervention to kick things off. And web tools like Radio are starting to offer even more grassroots collaboration options.

So I don't think I'll be worrying too much about next year's Lotusphere, either. Besides, I need a few more years before I go back to DisneyWorld to recover.

*BFHD = big fat hairy deal

<img src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0001227/images/2002/01/30/myhead.gif&quot; width="80" height="111"

It's nice to 'Share(?)

I'm headed to BrainShare in March. Is anybody else?