Daniel Lyons' article in Forbes, "IBM in Denial Over Lotus Notes" is a trap. Volker wisely alludes to this. With lines like "Meanwhile, Notes consultants have resorted to bashing... ", "Nevertheless Notes zealots cling to this...", and "IBM and its head-in-the-sand Lotus 'community' insist", Mr. Lyons anticipates that there will be a reaction to his article and he preemptively colors it as bashing, zealotry, and head-in-the-sand. Very clever, Mr. Lyons. Very clever.

Here I go, however, walking into the trap. Ever so carefully, but also quite confident in my ability to emerge unscathed. I have already entered the trap indirectly, anyhow. Over on C|Net, Charles Cooper linked to the Lyons article and called it "great". I could not resist the urge to respond. Since I'm not sure how long C|NET maintains comment threads, I'll reproduce my response here. (Ed. note: I've slightly altered the text here to account for the fact that when writing it initially, I used the word "good" where I should have used "great".)

(I don't use the "read more" feature of blogsphere all that often, but this article is quite long, so at this point if you're on the home page of my blog I'm going to make you click into the full story if you want to follow my progress as I walk into the trap...)

By what standards of journalism is this article "great"?
Posted by: Richard Schwartz 
Posted on: April 6, 2005, 5:03 PM PDT
Story:  Is IBM in denial about Notes?

E.g., quoting from the article "Notes has a user interface that some consider dated and overly complex. The product is also costly to operate, some say."

Since when is it considered good practice in journalism, even in opinion pieces, to attribute statements with the phrase "some say". The author could have written "Notes is the spawn of Satan, some say", and his statement would be no less factually correct, because someone somewhere has said it, but there's no authority to it.

Next, Mr. Lyons expresses his opinion about IBM's Workplace strategy with "IBM says Workplace Messaging won't replace Notes. Instead, IBM says Notes will, ahem, evolve and become part of the Workplace family." Mr. Lyons is certanly entitled to his, ahem, opinion, but it is notable that he fails to back it with any facts. The first stage of the evolution of Notes into the Workplace family has been publicly demonstrated by IBM in the Notes plug-in for the IBM Workplace Rich Client. It will be available in Notes 7 which is in beta now. There's no "ahem" there.

I'm not going to say that the article is all bad. I'm certainly interested in seeing IBM's reply to the point-by-point review of industry analyst reports that Mr. Lyons presents at the end of the story. Still, the article does not qualify as "great", and given that Mr. Lyons predicted the imminent demise of Lotus Notes in August 1998 and here we are in 2005, I have to question whether the odds of his being right this time are any better than they were six and half years ago.

Aside: Now I'm going to start getting google hits for "Notes is the spawn of Satan". Oh well ;-)

Although IBM has yet to respond (and given the inherent trap that Mr. Lyons laid for them, perhaps they would be best advised not to do so), the blogosphere has already begun to react. Before I comment any further, therefore, I want to review some other reactions. Also over on the C|Net thread, I see that Ben also posted a very good response, pointing out the only reasonable answer to Mr. Cooper's (rhetorical?) question "If he could turn back the clock to 1995, I wonder whether former CEO Lou Gerstner would still pull the trigger on IBM’s $3.5 billion Lotus acquisition knowing how history turned out. What do you think?". After I had made my initial response, I had considered making another one with the point that Cooper's "how history turned out" comment was rather incongruous given that Lotus Notes and Domino have been a huge success so far under IBM, bringing 80m to 118m users into the IBM fold (depending on who you believe), and that the history of competition in the messaging market has not yet come close to having "turned out" definitively one way or the other, so I'm glad Ben pointed this out. He was probably a little more polite than I might have been.

A couple of analysts have weighed in on the Forbes article, as well. I'm glad about that, because the article does do a point-by-point rundown of several analyst opinions. Peter O'Kelly's response was very brief. Peter's reputation in the industry is pretty well known. and he has been participating in a series of Microsoft workshops that cover "the value that individual MS technologies deliver when used to extend existing Notes/Domino deployments" (and which, by reports I've read, has quite a bit of "migration" flavor worked in with the "extend" theme), so I think that his objectivity is unassailable. I actually read his seemingly understated comment that the article is "unusually harsh" as being a rather harsh assessment. Michael Sampson has also posted a strong response, directly taking on the issue of how the Lotus community reacted to some recent analyst reports. I love Michael's closing remark, "The Lyons article doesn't add anything to the arguments at play."

Reactions from bloggers that have come through my aggregator so far include

• GreyHawk pointed out that Lyons wrote an article in 1998 called "Decline and Fall of Lotus". GreyHawk found the text of the article, a revised version, and a (highly unusual) letter from the editor of Forbes defending the article. History has proven incontrovertibly that most of that article's contentions and it's conclusion that "IBM's purchase of Lotus has turned into a pretty expensive ego trip." were simply wrong back then. They remain wrong today. Update More from GreyHawk here.

• Bruce Elgort's blog is currently off-line. Duffbert is covering this over in his own blog. My understanding is that Bruce emailed a response to Mr. Lyons and Bruce's employer was contacted as a result. I have to ask, what kind of reporter contacts someone's employer about an email message commenting on an article? As I said above, the article was a trap. I'm quite sure that Bruce will escape relatively unscathed. I'm reasonably certain that his blog will come back, though it might be a little different even if only as a matter of prudence. Update Bruce is back.

• Duffbert also has a response in his own blog. "It's obvious that Lyons has an axe to grind, and that the story he wants to tell is how analysts have been unfairly maligned by bloggers who have called them to task for biased reporting. Actually, I'm leaning toward multiple axes, myself, Tom.

• Chris Byrne has an extensive response in his blog. Chris mentions that during the interview stage, the article was apparently initially described as coverage of last year's Radicati flap, and while it is obviously referring to it obliquely, that's not what the article is about, is it? Chris wasn't interviewed for the article, but I'd be very interested in hearing from someone who was in order to establish whether or not Mr. Lyons misrepresented his intended topic to interviewees. I'm no expert on ethics in journalism, but I suspect that such misrepresentation would probably be frowned upon.

• There are no minced words in Ray Davies' response. If I am indeed walking somewhat incautiously in this trap, Ray, my friend, you are running full speed! Good for you. :-)

Well, that's quite a lot of coverage in a short period of time. Despite that, and despite the trap, I do have a thing or two to add to the discussion.

Mr. Lyons started his article with an analogy between IBM and Monty Python's Black Knight. My immediate reaction that is this: If IBM is the one without arms or legs, then why is it that Microsoft found it necessary to purchase Groove Networks and hire Ray Ozzie? According to this NetworkWorldFusion, Groove's revenues in 2003 were $12 million, and they've had no new customer announcements in 18 months, and the assertion that Microsoft will Microsoft, Groove's largest investor, would recoup about $80 million is merely a whitewash of the fact that Microsoft is really paying out more to get Groove, so whatever they are "recouping" in terms of cash is simply a transfer back of what they are paying for their own shares. What Microsoft is getting is intellectual property worth, in the current market, far less than what they have paid. IBM certainly could have purchased Groove, and while I'm not privvy to any information other than rumors (some of my own making), it's a very good bet that discussions to that effect took place, but IBM didn't need Groove. Microsoft is the real Black Knight, and Groove is their latest attempt to find a leg to stand on in the collaboration space... or at least to proclaim their invincibility. With all due respect to Ray Ozzie as Microsoft's newest CTO, he's going to be biting at IBM's legs for quite a while.

Now, finally, let's look at the different opinions of market share in messaging and collaboration. I'll grant that Microsoft is certainly ahead by some measures. Although I do have some small and medium business customers using Notes and Domino -- and I know that almost all of my coleagues in the Lotus services arena can say the same -- I have no doubt that Microsoft is doing significantly better than IBM outside of the large enterprises. I don't have the market research to back this, but the evidence seems to me to be compelling. And while I'd really like to see IBM address the SMB market better, and I have frequently told them that the education gap is the sine qua non that they need to get past in order to ultimately succeed in SMB. Still, the point is that IBM is doing better in the market that is their traditional strongpoint: the large enterprise, and Microsoft is doing better in SMB. Given the relative strengths and weaknesses in their products and marketing, this should be a surprise to no one.

Mr. Lyons may or may not be showing personal bias in his assessment of IBM. I think he probably is, but that's really irrelevant. Plenty of unbiased analysts manage to misjudge the messging and collaboration market. Viewing this market as a zero sum where one vendor's gains must imply another vendor's inevitable decline is overly simplistic. There's still some room for growth in both areas, as there are still under-served user populations, but unlike the desktop market and the office suites market, there are not now and never were conditions in the messaging and collaboration market that favored monopoly or near-monopoly dominance. Both IBM and Microsoft, and perhaps some other players, will continue to be strong in this market for quite some time to come. Both of their product sets will continue to evolve, and neither of them will gain such a compelling and long-lasting advantage in either TCO or fitness for all purposes. Nor will either ever have the wherewithal to force a wholesale move of their customer base from one generation to the next at will, or to chop off entire limbs from their opponent's customer base. Any analyst or reporter who looks objectively at the current state of the market says otherwise is the true Black Knight, and will end up standing there shouting "None shall pass" while everyone laughs and passes him by.

Update (6/23): IBM did, eventually (but I'm not sure exactly when), post an official reaction to the Forbes article.

1. 04/07/2005 01:39:39 PM

Please, let's not feed the fire further. The Lotus community would be best served by not taking the bait.

2. Richard Schwartz04/07/2005 02:40:38 PM
Homepage: http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/PowerOfTheSchwartz.nsf

I appreciate your concern, and agree that there's no point fanning the flames, but there's already some smoke blowing through and my intention is simply to clear it up a bit.

-rich

TrackBack From Ben's Blog04/08/2005 11:01:37 AM

Analysts

Some say an analyst wrote an article this week. Some say it's great. Some say it's a load of shi*....

4. John Willemse04/09/2005 10:32:16 AM
Homepage: http://www.badkey.com/

The only thing I can say to the whole story is I agree.

Keep up the good stories !