IBM threat to Knowledge Workers .. From: Bob Muglia (Exchange) Friday, Thursday 17, 1996 4:57 PM To: Bob Muglia's Direct Reports (Exchange DL); Kurt DelBene (Exchange); Steven Sinofsky; Brian Arbogast (Exchange); Richard McAniff; Craig Flabig; (Exchange); Russell Stockdale (Exchange); Betsy Johnson (Exchange); Andrew Kwatinetz; Gordon Manglone (Exchange) Cc: Bill Gates; Steve Ballmer; Paul Maritz; Jim Allchin (Exchange); David Vaskevitch Subject IBM threat to Knowledge Workers After yesterday's IBM competitive review, I thought it would be usefull to send some mail which summarizes a set of concerns I have been considering. I believe that if you look at everything IBM is doing, it is fair to consider that they are executing on a comprehsive strategy to take knowledge workers away from MS. Their strategy: 1. Capture the knowledge worker data in Domino. 2. Replace the Office desktop with Notes. 3. Create the oppurtunity for an IBM OS on the business desktop which replaces Windows. You can argue that for Lotus's 30M customers, we've already lost their data to Domino. As Bill pointed out yesterday, this is gone and we need to do something to get it back. For the desktop apps, the situation is better but tenuous. Most customers who use Notes today also use Office. But if you look at the R5 Notes Ui, they are clearly focused on minimizing the reasons for a user to run Office. We saw a glimpse of that with the Java HTML editor in R5. Lotus has 540 people building desktop apps and we know that msot of these guys aren't working on Smartsuite. I think it reasonab;e to believe that these people are building Java editors which can fit into the Notes desktop and effectivly replace Office. This is very scary because if the knowledge worker only needs Notes and Domino then we have truly lost that user. This impacts more than Office because the knowledge worker desktop is the foundation upon which we want to build for business aps and commerce. Put another way, how hard would it be to sign an EA with a customer who isn't using Office? Lastly, although from where we sit today it might seem distant, I think we must assume that IBM's ultimate goal is to use Notes to enable the replacement of Windows on the business desktop. If a users data is in Domino and their UI/app is Notes, then Windows is basically irrelevant for that user. We know IBM is building an NC OS but I think we could be confised about this being just a terminal replacement. With Domino as your filesystem, there is no reason why this OS couldn't support mobile scenarios. When you add a Java-based runtime environment to the picture, the Notes/Domino/NC could be wrapped up in a crisp package as a replacement for the Windows desktop and Office. IBM account control could make this proposition attractive for many companies. So how can we win? 1. Keep the data we have. Get back the data we've lost to Domino 2. Make Notes unnecessary 3. Provide unique value to Windows desktops. In the medium term, we need to enrich the filesystem to once again make this an attractive place to store documents. But for now, to keep the data we have, we need to use Platinum/PKM as a rich store with moderm features people have come to expect from solutions like Domino. We need to get Platinum/PKM deployed on servers with support for symmetric client-side caching and offline capabilities ASAP. This is required just to stay in the game. Yesterday at the IBM review, Bill and I had a "discussion" about what it would take to get back Domino customers. To start, we need parity with Notes/Domino feature set. We also obviously need additional features beyond Notes that causes customers to choose our solution. To help them with migration, we need to continue the work currently underway to move all the data and run Notes apps on our solution. While I don't think the way to do this is to independently develop full Domino compatibility, there is a lot we can do which we aren't yet doing. For example we will probably need to add additional semantics to the Outlook/CDO object model to enable easy conversion of Notes apps onto our solution. I like Steve's idea tp prioritize this work based on customer input from companies like E & A. We have already done some of this but I'm not clear if we've yet done this based on the Outlook 2000 and Platinum feature set. In the desktop space, while most Lotus customers today also run Office, we must assume that this can't last. The question comes down to: Which will they choose in the future? Office or Notes? For Office to win, the combination of Office+BackOffice needs to easily enable a full set of solutions customers solve today with Notes. A lot of very positive things are happening around this as a part of the ATG planning process. It is critical that these conversations turn into product plans which we can efectivly bring to market. Jon and I have talked about doing a short cycle on the next release of Office to quickly get the KM benefits of Office+BackOffice in the Platinum timeframe. This also came up during today's customer feedback review. We need to decide what to do here. Another related issue which yesterdays Notes client demo highlighted is the need for us to pull together a cohesive set of developer/design tools which simplify the creation of common scenarios. It may be hard to do this in the short cycle. On the Windows client front, we have spent a lot of time discussing this. It is clear that providing a compelling developer message, a great mobile experience, and simplifying the installation and management of our software can solve many of our problems. This is tough but I think we all agree we need to do this. Anyway, I didn't think all of this was summarized yesterday so I thought it usefull to pull it together. Comments are welcome. bob http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/px03000.pdf -- court documents in the case of Comes v Microsoft. -- From the MICROS'1 dictionary of technical terms 'add additional semantics', verb .. Clone something and copy it into your own apps.