Between The Lines of the ZDNet Ambuj Goyal Interview

Via Ed Brill and also Jack Dausman, I found my way to ZDNet's very timely interview with Ambuj Goyal. Excerpts:

What did you make of the Radacti report? Do you think that they have a point about the whole Workplace strategy and the upgrade path for Notes/Domino being rather ambiguous at the moment?
Their conclusions don't make sense to me at all. Radicati are one of the companies that six or eight months ago reported the exact opposite of what they are saying now and the input was exactly the same. If the input remains the same and their output changes dramatically, then I have a basic problem with their conclusions.

What about their figures claiming that IBM's combined market share will fall from 24 percent to 17 percent over the next four years while Microsoft will experience steady growth to 33 percent share by 2008?
I don't know how they came up with that. In IBM we don't report brand-orientated revenue but after every quarter our CFO reports significant progress in a vertical environment and he chose to report that our base messaging business grew by double digits. So how did we grow double-digit percentages in a declining market? IDC just reported numbers and in 2003 they have us with a bigger market share than Microsoft does in the same market. We have never lost our No.1 position since our acquisition of Lotus in 1995.

It's great to see the Lotus GM being so up-to-the-minute on something that the blogosphere has been so deeply concerned about. The Radicati report would undoubtedly have gotten a lot of attention in Lotus Software no matter what... but I have to think that the ZDNet reporter's interest in the story must have have been influenced by the high level of blog activity, and Mr. Goyal didn't beat around the bush the way one might imagine other's who have been in his position might have. What I think is most notable, however, is that the interview responses show that Mr. Goyal is clearly focused on the here-and-now. He could have easliy directed his responses to the questions in this interview to promote the Workplace/Portal/J2EE vision and all the various associated buzzwords, but he didn't do that. The most telling sentence: "when customers are doing server consolidation they are doing Domino". Not Workplace. Not Lotus Workplace Messaging. Domino. These other things are important, strategic, and they surely get a lot of Mr. Goyal's attention, but Notes and Domino are the here and now. If nothing else convinces you that Notes and Domino are still high up on the radar screen of everyone at IBM Lotus Software, this interview should.