Another day, another D'oh!

I am starting to realise that Domino is a lot more trouble than I first thought.

In Australia, saying you are a Domino/Notes professional is about as popular as saying you work as a telemarketer. And the career prospects of Domino professionals have been pretty dismal for the past few years thanks to IBM's lack of leadership. While other vendors have been making hay in what is probably the hottest IT market conditions in a decade, IBM has totally fumbled the collaboration market segment. Net result: learning Domino is not sexy and is much less attractive to younger IT workers than picking up all things Microsoft or J2EE or PHP or AJAX or whatever.

Another, but related, problem is that this comes after first confusing the hell out of Domino customers with their Workplace strategy, then came a long period of radio silence, then a long beta cycle for a product which is much fatter and more slowly than the previous version. (That's 'slowly' as in 'cutting two legs off a dog and making it run up a sand dune into a head wind'.) So the large customers are confused and uncertain. That means they are not investing in Domino internally.

Put simply, I know of no mid/senior IT execs or business managers who stand up in an organisation and say 'Domino is the answer'. What I do hear is a bunch of people saying 'Domino is just mail, right?, so lets just get Exchange and be done with it.'

And now it is too late. The large IT consultancies seem to have already decided that Domino is a dead business. They have invested in other technological products and futures. And they are telling their uncertainty-filled large customers to re-write everything in .Net or Java or whatever framework they have just trained their pimply-faced associate-level consultants in.

Am I being too harsh? Please tell me I am wrong. I want to be wrong. Lotus technologies were superbly innovative a decade ago. But now that IBM have assimilated Lotus the whole thing has been a bit brain dead. Let me know what you think.