dadams.co.uk

…if it means coming back to news like this.

“Led by strong sales of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 in the second quarter of 2008, IBM’s Lotus software business outgrew Microsoft by winning millions of customer seats worldwide in direct competition with Microsoft, aided by key wins over its Redmond-based rival in emerging markets.”

“With 15 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, IBM’s flagship Lotus Notes and Domino products has been transformed into a versatile tool that consolidates the individual’s work world onto one screen, employs Web 2.0 technologies and reduces time spent on email. Lotus Notes and Domino adoption has grown to more than 140 million licenses…”

This comes after I spent my first morning back at work with a customer looking at Domino as a replacement for Exchange.

Spread the word…

Remember Friends Reunited? It was all the rage for a while, but now sites like Facebook have taken over in terms of popularity. Poor old Friends Reunited have even had to drop the charges for their services. Every now and again, Friends Reunited send me an e-mail to tell me who’s recently added themselves to my schools or workplaces - not exactly a great deal of activity on that front. But I was amused (or bemused) to see the following suggestion on the most recent e-mail…

Why not add yourself to these places?

• Beechwood Avenue, Bangor
• Box, Corsham
• Ash Street, Huddersfield

Well let me see… I’ve never been to these places and they have no connection with my life, so there’s two good reasons for starters.

Stay tuned for reasons why I shouldn’t add myself to Corporation Street, Aberystwyth.

I may have mentioned a couple of times that the dear old impartial BBC does seem occasionally to give our friends at Microsoft rather a lot of column inches on the BBC News web site. Indeed, my frolleague Pete Hampton calls them MSBBC. It was particularly noticeable around the time of the release of Windows Vista when the Beeb’s technology news page was rather like a thinly-disguised Vista ad campaign.

I’ve had some heated discussions about the fact that IBM, and of course Lotus, get very little mention on the Beeb’s news site. I banged my fists about the lack of coverage of Symphony… wouldn’t the world be interested about a free alternative to Office from a major software vendor? At the time of Sametime 7.5’s release there were a lot of issues with travel from airports, extremely topical for a discussion on real-time collaboration, but the world’s leading enterprise real-time solution (yes, Lotus Sametime) didn’t get a look-in. I shall say no more.

It was quite a while ago that Bill Gates, saviour of planet Earth, announced that he was going to step down from his post at Microsoft. At that time, the Beeb covered it in great detail. In the last two weeks the countdown to Bill clearing his desk started in earnest and the Beeb’s Microsoft sycophancy went into overdrive. A timeline of his career, a photo album of Gates through the years, how he changed the world, the secret of his success (i.e. nicking other people’s ideas), how Saint Bill was going to spread joy using his vast fortune, it was all there and more. Bill couldn’t sit down because the Beeb’s collective tongues were pasted to his backside.

But wait a second… what’s this? In the midst of this big Bill love-in the Beeb have allowed Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, to write an article. Clearly ‘free software’ is a concept slightly at odds with Microsoft’s way of life. I can see someone saying “ah, Daz, there’s loads of free software on Microsoft’s site”. And that’s true. But it is also true that Bill and co became infeasibly rich, and that wasn’t as a result of giving software away. I don’t have a problem with Bill being rich, good luck to him. Robust functional software takes hundreds of thousands of man-hours to develop - open source is one thing, but free is another, so let’s get real. But back to the article.

As you’d expect from the champion of free software, Mr Stallman’s article “It’s not the Gates, it’s the bars” is rather scathing. It mentions Microsoft’s three convictions for anti-competitive behaviour, and reminds us that George Dubya Bush was invited to Redmond while looking for funding for his 2000 campaign, and he later let Microsoft off one of those convictions. Unsurprisingly Mr Stallman focuses on proprietary software, and has a quick pop at Apple and Adobe too… IBM escape a mention, maybe he lets them off because of their involvement with OpenOffice and Linux.

Anyway, whatever your opinion it’s an interesting read, and in being anti-Microsoft it’s a bit of a rarity on the Beeb’s hallowed pages.