What keeps Steve Ballmer awake at night? No, not Mrs Ballmer’s snoring. And probably not the IBM Lotus portfolio. Linux maybe? Well, someone from Microsoft did once tell me that Lotus doesn’t keep Bill Gates awake at night (hence my comment) but Linux does. Why Linux? Because it starts to break down Microsoft’s halo effect… Linux servers replacing Windows servers will hinder .NET and SharePoint deployments and Linux desktops will scupper Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s main cash-cows.

If the noise of Steve gnashing his teeth over Linux drowns out Mrs Ballmer’s snoring, what effect is Apple’s popularity having? Regardless of how good Zune media players may be, the cool-ness of wire-lessly sharing media with other Zune owners is dampened by the fact that there may be no other Zune owners within a fifty mile radius. Throw a Zune randomly over your shoulder in an urban area and chances are you’ll hit two iPod owners (one directly, and the second when the Zune bounces off the first person’s head).

What about the Mac versus the Windows-based personal computer? From here on I’ll adopt Microsoft’s moniker for the ‘PC’. According to a comment on Cult of Mac, PCs outsell Macs by ten-to-one. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Macs are more expensive (we’ll have the “you get for you pay for” argument later) – that may not be so much of an impact for the private consumer who will have to save a bit longer or dip into more of the savings to cough up £1,500 for an iMac or MacBook Pro, versus £800 for a good-quality Windows PC or laptop. But in business that amount of extra money doesn’t wash when you multiply it across two, five, ten or fifty thousand people. Companies will look for a massively-discounted deal on some fit-for-business kit… not top of the range but it’ll do the job. And that’s not the business Apple are in, although they have some traction in some market sectors. Some companies are indulging in the idea of consumerisation – the idea of giving an employee a sum of money to choose their own computing kit – but if their critical business applications run on Windows only it becomes Hobson’s choice for the operating system.

This makes me wonder what Microsoft are playing at with their PC vs Mac mini-site. Are they worried about starting to lose the corporate market? Probably not. However, consider the fact that Microsoft get a lot of mileage from the fact that people use Windows and Office at home (and college) and then take that advocacy into the workplace… could a growing number of Macs used in personal life start to chip away at the Windows dominance in the business environment? Maybe, but I also think that Microsoft are targetting those people who may be seduced by Apple’s cool factor… people like me… I was seduced and it was the best £1,500 I ever spent (not including money spent on an engagement ring to secure the hand of the current Mrs Adams).

Microsoft put forward a number of compelling arguments to halt that seduction…

You can’t get a Mac that ships with a Blu-ray player, TV tuner, Memory Stick reader, or built-in 3G wireless.

Some of that may be true, but you can get a Mac with a built-in SD card reader. Whatever, none of those omissions have bothered me in the slightest.

Macs can’t connect to an Xbox 360.

Why would I want to connect my Mac to my Xbox?

Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC. For example, the mouse works differently.

Indeed, that’s why I clicked on the option to make my Mac mouse behave like a PC mouse… so now the mouse works in the way I got used to on a PC. The Mac is a different beast to a PC in many ways, so why would everything work the same? This statement implies that Windows is perfect in every way, and to deviate from that is a step back. And that’s complete garbage, because there’s loads of things that Windows does badly that the Mac does better.

With a Mac, it’s harder to set up secure sharing for your photos, music & movies, documents, and even printers with other computers on your home network.

That’s a statement totally lacking in any evidence. I’ll give you one example… I have an Archos media player, and it was a hell of a lot easier to set up media streaming from the Mac than from Windows. In fact I wouldn’t even say “set up” because from the Mac it just worked. Windows required some tinkering, encouragement and a small amount of swearing.

If there’s a Mac version of a program you need, you’ll have to buy it again and relearn how to use it on a Mac. [Note the 'If' in italics].

What do users of GarageBand and iMovie for Windows think about this statement?

Macs only come in white or silver. PCs are available in a full spectrum of colors across a range of price points.

This is clearly Apple’s biggest mistake. They made iPods available in a range of colours but failed to do the same with the Macs, a decision that could ruin the company </sarcasm>. Ironically in this one statement, they mixed the most ridiculous reason (the colour choices) with the strongest factor of PCs… the fact that there is a great variety of choice in specifications, price, vendor and ultimately quality. Apple’s offerings are more expensive and more limited in choice.

But do you get what you pay for? After using an iMac at home for over a year, and now a MacBook Pro when out and about, I’d say yes. Even on a well-specced ThinkPad I’d experience an awful lot of egg-timer in a day. On the Mac everything is almost instantaneous. Bear in mind that on the iMac at home there’s usually two other people logged in and I’m running a lot of applications, but it never goes into one of those disk-thrashing death spirals of unresponsiveness. Yes, it’s better specced than the ThinkPad and it cost more, but that’s why I do say that you get what you pay for and (in my humble opinion) it’s worth it.

Thanks to my frolleague Mark Holmes for the link to a very enlightening article on ZDNet. It discusses the fact that although Microsoft Exchange has “clear market dominance” – figures and sources please, ZDNet – there are alternatives on the market. That’s probably not a huge revelation, especially if you work for a company that doesn’t use Exchange.

These Exchange alternatives exist because they tend to work out cheaper, as well as being easier to both manage and support. At the same time, they deliver similar levels of scalability and robustness as the Microsoft original.

“Robustness”. Anyway, moving on… the article freely admits that it doesn’t include Notes / Domino or GroupWise as alternatives. Why?

…mainly because they’re rarely seen as like-for-like replacements.

Note to ZDNet… yes they are. But okay, I think I know what they’re getting at, even if I don’t agree. Exchange does e-mail, calendars, that kind of stuff. That’s it really. Domino does a hell of a lot more, and to be fair so does GroupWise. So if they’re just looking at e-mail, why didn’t they mention LotusLive Notes or iNotes? Perhaps we should leave the final word to the one and only respondant at the time of writing, known as dnicoll…

To exclude the market leading competitive products from this review is simply inexcusable and makes the whole article worthless.

It was just over two years ago that Michael Vizard of eWeek wrote:

Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations.

Unfortunately the actual article is no longer available, but if you Google ‘michael vizard exchange pain’ you’ll find enough references to the article to prove that it once existed. Obviously this referred to earlier versions of Exchange, but it would seem that things haven’t changed much. To the casual observer it would appear that every new version of Exchange brings significant differences to the architecture, presumably as they attempt to fix deficiencies. Remember that their approach to e-mail storage changed with Exchange 2010, potentially causing a huge increase in the storage requirements.

Today, a handsome and enigmatic Scotsman sent me a link to Ferris Research’s blog, and the article in question starts…

It’s impossible to keep in control of Exchange / Outlook PST files. All in all, their management is a major pain.

I’ll be honest and say that I’m no expert on the Exchange architecture, but it’s interesting to see it’s administrative tools being described as “not a scalable solution” and the word ‘pain’ invokes a sense of deja-vu.

My frolleague Richard ‘Dickie’ Voaden (who I bumped into in Sweden last week) forwarded a link today, reminding me that the Grim Reaper of software will soon be coming to collect Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and take it to the underworld (and it’ll have Netscape Navigator to keep it company). My reply  to Dickie was something along the lines of “good, and they can do us all a favour and bury Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and plans for any future versions, at the same time”. But you know what…? I actually don’t really care, because I’m very happy as a Firefox user – I’m most happy on the Mac, it’s as good on Windows as you can expect it to be, and it’s great on Linux. When I do use Internet Explorer, because certain applications deem that I do, I just use it and close it again.

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about a story on the BBC News site which reported that:

Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced.

Now, this came as a bit of a surprise because to my knowledge I already had an option, one which I exercised several years ago… and I chose Firefox. Safari is my second choice, followed by Google’s Chrome, and the only reason that Internet Explorer is my fourth choice is that there’s no other browser installed. I didn’t have to wait for Microsoft to tell me I had a choice.

However, I’m sure that the less computer-literate users stick with what’s installed with Windows (i.e. Internet Explorer), and this is what Europe’s Competition Commission are setting out to fix. In certain circumstances Windows will notify the user that they have a choice of browser and present the options to them.

I was amused by the last paragraph of the most recent article on this subject:

Some fear the browser choice system will confuse people. Already some who have been confronted with the choice screen have been worried that their machine has been taken over or fallen victim to a virus.

The irony is that if you switch away from Internet Explorer it’s less likely that your system will be taken over by a virus*.

* I have no proof that this statement is correct, so you may choose to disregard it.

Like most people of the Lotus persuasion, I remember the days when advocates of Microsoft Exchange were very fond of stating that Domino was very wasteful of disk space because of it’s architecture – everyone has their own mail box and each e-mail (and it’s attachments) would be stored separately per mail box. So if I e-mailed 20 mb of file attachments to 10 users I’d be creating 200 mb of allotted disk space on the server(s). I’d also deserve to have my knee-caps broken.

Exchange on the other hand would save the file attachments once per server, resulting in much less space taken up… although the reality, so I understand it, was that the attachments would be saved once per storage group. Domino’s counter-argument was always that it’s architecture made it much more robust… problems to my mail box (which I’ve never had in 18 years) would not affect your mail box. But many are the stories of entire Exchange object stores suffering problems that take down mail access for all users for hours at a time. Domino advocates made statements long the lines of “disk space is cheap, down-time isn’t” – this is true, but there are cost of ownership aspects associated with large quantities of data (e.g. doing a back-up).

For Domino customers the big news of version 8.5 was the Domino Attachment and Object Service, otherwise known as DAOS. I’m sure that most of my potential audience know what DAOS is and does – it stores attachments once per server, therefore cutting down disk usage and also bandwidth usage. It also has performance benefits… if that large file is being written once to the disk rather than multiple times, the I/O will be reduced. Customers have been reporting reductions in disk space of up to 60%. All good stuff.

So what about Exchange? Well, while we’ve been moving in the direction of reducing the disk usage, it seems that Microsoft are pushing their customers in the other direction by removing single instance storage. An article on The Register references another article which states that the “change also reduces the overall size of Exchange databases”… but The Register conclude that “across a large enterprise with tens of thousands of Exchange users, there must be the potential for multiple tens of gigabytes of wasted storage space – if not terabytes”. Whatever, the overall theme seems to be more changes to the Exchange architecture, so no wonder in place upgrades aren’t possible. Meanwhile DAOS is something that’s optional and evolutionary to an existing and consistent Domino architecture.

This article on ZDNet makes an interesting read on the pros and cons of Exchange 2010.

Bear in mind that upgrades to an e-mail infrastructure are never trivial – they require planning, execution, resources and funds, and sometimes carry a small amount of risk when moving from a mature stable version to a newer version. Although I show a slide with successive versions of Domino and the word ‘upgrade’ plastered all over it, I recognise it’s often a major undertaking for companies with thousands of users. However, it seems that Microsoft are willing to pile more risk on their customers and ask for more resources and funds.

Imagine you’re a customer running Domino 6.5 and you want to upgrade your servers to 8.5 – I’m not going to say it always takes just 30 minutes per server because often customers will use an upgrade to implement new capabilities, consolidate servers, tidy up aspects of the infrastructure and so on. But Domino upgrades can be performed in-place and allow customers to skip versions – 6.5 to 8.5, no problem – and servers can actually be upgraded in 30 minutes.

Compare that with the considerations for Exchange 2010…

Exchange 2010 is a 64-bit-only release. Other caveats: users who want to run Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 together must upgrade to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2. And Exchange 2007 also won’t work at all on Windows Server 2008 R2, so users who want to run Exchange on the latest and greatest Windows Server release have no choice but to upgrade to Exchange 2010. In-place upgrades from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 seemingly are prohibited.

Now imagine that you’re in charge of the Exchange upgrade – you have 30 Exchange servers, but the lack of support for in-place upgrades means that you have to build a new server and then move all the mail data from the Exchange 2007 server over to the Exchange 2010 server… multiplied by 30. So you need more servers (all of which need the latest 64-bit operating system and require hardware capable of supporting it), more time and by moving so much data across servers you have just substantially increased your risk of something going badly wrong. Also note that there’s no mention here of a direct upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2010 – it’s probably not possible, but feel free to correct me. In the Domino world there’s really no major hurdles in upgrading the 2003 release (6.5) up to the late 2009 release (8.5.1). Imagine telling a Domino customer they can’t do an in-place upgrade.

We’re currently working on return-on-investment cases, but it’s fair to say that we’re seeing a cost of ownership reductions of 30% or more in upgrades from 6.5 to 8.5. The huge improvements in scalability could see an even higher reduction in cost for some companies depending on their existing server estate. DAOS, which provides an average reduction in mail storage of around 50%, is another big factor in the cost reduction. But I always say that customers should look at the future… and also the past. Domino has a long history of upgrades – never a migration, never a requirement to move data from one server to another. Yes, server operating systems such as Windows NT have been dropped and hardware does get replaced. Look to the future and you can be confident that in-place upgrades will continue. Look at the Domino server requirements and you can be fairly certain that Domino will be less fussy than Exchange about what it runs on. Got 32-bit hardware, got Windows 2003 Server? That’s okay – it’s what we call ‘protection of investment’.

I’m not going to deny that here in Lotusland we speak to some customers who are considering a move to Exchange. Funnily I’ve never heard the compelling reasons be anything to with the server, it’s always about either Outlook or an Enterprise Agreement that provides the software for ‘free’. On the subject of Outlook, I’ve found that a good look at Notes 8.x goes a long way to stem the cases of Outlook lust. On the subject of ‘free’ software, IBM run Project Liberate in order to show customers how much money can be saved on their Microsoft licensing… and even if the software is ‘free’ (which it’s not) the cost of the migration per user completely wipes out any cost benefit several times over. Oh, and then the annual cost of ownership will be higher. And we haven’t even got onto the subject of the mission-critical Notes applications yet.

Let’s imagine a customer running Notes / Domino 6.5 – they’ve reached a fork in the road, do they upgrade to Notes / Domino 8.5, or do they migrate to Exchange? A Domino upgrade will be the lesser of the two projects in terms of disruption, risk, cost, man-power and will deliver a scalable robust secure solution with a world-class flexible (and great-looking) collaboration client. What about the Exchange route? The current product is Exchange 2007, but Microsoft have advised anyone not already on Exchange 2007 to forget it…

At TechEd, keynote presenter Bill Veghte, senior vice president for the Windows business, said companies testing Vista should stop and move to testing Windows 7. The same advice was repeated for users who have not yet moved to Exchange 2007; they were told to skip it and wait for 2010.

So, Microsoft say that customers should deploy the new version when it ships in October or thereabouts. Hands up, how many Domino customers deploy a .0 version of the software? Oooh, not many, and here we’re talking about an upgrade to a consistent architecture. So how many want to deploy Exchange 2010 before it receives it’s first service pack? If you have your hand up my personal opinion is that you need your head tested. Service pack 1 for Exchange 2007 was released one year after the initial server release. For Exchange 2003 the first service pack came about 7 months later. Based on this, let’s take a guess at Exchange 2010 service pack 1 coming Spring next year.

In summary, Domino customers at this decision point have a choice – they can upgrade now and start to realise cost savings immediately, or they can wait until Spring 2010 to start an expensive and risky migration project that really won’t save any money at all.

The Internet is a wonderful place to spend some time, but it has it’s bad points. Firstly there’s the criminal element – hackers, virus writers, spy and malware, and people making kind offers to deposit Nigerian fortunes in your bank account. And then there’s the problem of whether the truth is out there, and how do you work out what’s true and what’s not… for example, is Lady GaGa really a hermaphrodite as was speculated this week? My guess is ‘no’, as anyone wanting to hide male dangly bits would wear loose-fitting trousers, not the stuff she wears.

Some content is honest in it’s lack of truth. One of my feeds is NewsBiscuit.com and I know that when I see headlines such as Court awards viewer of new Will Ferrell film 101 minutes of his life back it’s not really true, even though the film probably does really suck. However I doubt if NewsBiscuit will ever improve on BBspot’s spoof classic story Atheist Still Unconvinced After Meeting with God or The Onion’s amazing video about the MacBook Wheel.

So, what’s this go to do with Microsoft Word? Yesterday when my news feed displayed a story entitled Microsoft Banned from Selling Word in the US I assumed it was spoof news… but it wasn’t. It’s true that a Texas judge has ruled that Microsoft cannot sell Word in the United States after a Canadian company, i4i, won an XML patent infringement case. The story was then picked up by a number of other sources such as The Register and Microsoft’s unofficial UK public relations partner the BBC.

Of course, Microsoft won’t actually stop selling Word in the US, or anywhere else…  if Microsoft’s appeal is lost the whole affair will then be settled with a nice fat cheque and i4i will go back to their business of selling XML-based products for Microsoft Word.

It’s also worth noting, as viewers of Mock The Week know all too well, that Frankie Boyle makes a mention of Lady GaGa’s balls every week… so maybe the truth is out there.

Tim Malone and his colleagues from IBM Premier Business Partner Intec have published information about their iMigrate solution which assists in Exchange to Domino migrations, and it also refers to the Exchange to Domino migration at Foodvest (better known by the  brand names of Findus, Young’s and The Seafood Company). Over 1,000 users from the Findus organisation were moved onto the consolidated Domino environment.

Intec also won an IBM award for their work, details of which can be found here. Congratulations to Tim and his team. We plan to work with Intec and Foodvest to provide a full case study sometime this year, so stay tuned. Along with Continental AG moving 40,000 users from Exchange to Domino, this is another good indication that customers continue to realise the value, power, cost-saving abilities and consistent roadmap of Notes and Domino.

Don’t worry, I’m not going mad in my old age nor have I gone over to the dark side. I’m referring to this article on the CIO web site. It’s hard not to be sarcastic about it, so I’m not even going to try to not be sarcastic. Quite frankly, if people can make a living out of writing articles like this, then I’m going to put fingers to keyboard and start on my latest masterpiece of journalism ’10 reasons why people who own a toaster should buy a loaf of bread’.

It’s interesting that CIO are running another Outlook-based article entitled “7 reasons not to use Microsoft Outlook for your company’s e-mail”. Just seven. How lazy of them. I have to say that it’s easier to debunk the 10 pro-Outlook reasons than it is to agree with the 7 counter-Outlook arguments. Top of my list for the arguments against would be “you’ll end up running Exchange”. Instead they bang on about HTML-based e-mails. But they do at least recognise Outlook’s propensity to corrupt it’s own mail box.

Before I start to stick the proverbial boot in, let me state that I recognise that the CIO article is not written in the context of reasons why Outlook should be used in preference to Lotus Notes. Anyway, let’s crack on and look at those 10 oh-so compelling reasons…

1. Outlook and Microsoft Exchange play well together – “if your e-mail server runs Microsoft Exchange, Outlook is a no-brainer”. Not a good start really. My first thought was that you could replace a few words and come up with “if your e-mail server runs Lotus Domino, Notes is a no-brainer”. When I have conversations with customers about the bird-brained idea of moving to Exchange (spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and arrive at an e-mail solution that does less than the one you had) it’s never about Exchange – no-one has ever told me that they think Exchange is superior to Domino. And even if they did I wouldn’t give them any credence – it requires more servers, the ‘upgrades’ are more difficult, the clustering is poor, and the up-time is consistently shown to be inferior. Outlook is the reason why companies choose Exchange…so if you have Exchange, why wouldn’t you use Outlook?

2. Outlook plays well with Active Directory – and you’d hope so wouldn’t you? Seeing as Microsoft have mandated Active Directory in an Exchange environment it’s what’s known as Hobson’s Choice.

3. Outlook integrates with many devices and applications – okay, to a certain extent I have to take this one on the chin. Outlook’s third party support is very broad. Good job done. However, I’m amused that the article states BlackBerry support as a key factor. Domino, Sametime, Connections… announcements from Lotusphere about Domino Designer, XPages, Quickr and Symphony. I know another vendor who could trump Microsoft’s BlackBerry integration.

4. Outlook makes it easy to organize your assets – not immediately apparent what this means, but a read-through reveals that it refers to rules, out-of-office, colour-coding and follow-up flags. I don’t believe Outlook is the only e-mail client on the market to offer this – there isn’t one thing listed that Notes doesn’t offer.  But how about recipient marking (i.e. that e-mail was sent to you only, or you and two other people), does Outlook have that? How about Outlook’s ultimate inbox? You remember, the one where you copy all of your old e-mails back into your inbox. Genius.

5. Outlook plays nicely with SharePoint – “Outlook users can opt to receive notifications of new or changed content by e-mail, then click through to the SharePoint site”. Wow. This is where the sarcasm can really kick in. URLs in e-mails, whatever next? SharePoint can integrate with Notes courtesy of Mainsoft’s plug-ins. Outlook 2007 can integrate with Lotus Quickr, thanks to an extension Lotus provide. Notes also supports integration with Quickr, Connections, Activities and Sametime (and a whole lot more). What I’m saying is that Outlook isn’t necessarily the pinnacle of integration between e-mail and collaborative solutions.

6. Outlook expedites workflow – surely no-one believes that Outlook is the most flexible client solution for workflow applications? “Companies can set up workflows for functions such as online voting. For example, if a group wants to decide on a location for a festive lunch, the coordinator can send a message offering several options”. Now that’s what I call mission-critical. Sarcasm meter goes into the red, and rightly so.

7. Outlook’s user interface is familiar – not to me it isn’t. Who’s it familiar to? Answer: existing Outlook users. Isn’t that what we call a self-fulfilling prochecy? Here, read this instruction manual – it’s in Vietnamese but the words should be very familiar to Vietnamese people. Okay, I know what they’re getting at. Outlook is (by a smaller margin than most people think) the market leader for corporate e-mail, and therefore if someone arrives from another company there’s a slightly higher chance they’ll have used Outlook in the past. However, thanks to that new ribbon thingy, is Outlook 2007 instantly familiar to Outlook 2003 users? I’ll take advice and comments on that one.

8. Outlook offers integrated calendar, tasks – who wrote this article? Someone who’s been frozen in ice for 15 years and whose last experience of e-mail and calendars was Microsoft Mail and Schedule Plus?

9. Believe it or not, Outlook has pretty good security – I’ll go for ‘not’. They’re actually missing some words here, and the missing words are “compared to previous versions of Outlook”. Compared to Notes it sucks. The article talks about junk mail filtering (like, wow), blocking external content, and disallowing executable attachments… which I don’t believe is any substitution for a managed Execution Control List based on verified signing authorities and the control that provides. I once likened Outlook security to a Ford Escort Mark II – I had one, and I could open a locked door with a wooden ice-lolly stick.

10. Outlook offers one-stop e-mail – yeah, okay, Outlook’s implementation of this approach to e-mail is pretty good. I think it’s better in Mozilla Thunderbird, but Outlook can have a few brownie points.

Look out for CIO’s next article ’10 reasons why people who can’t spell Vista should carry on running XP or buy a Mac’.

Oh, by the way, Ed Brill and I posted at round-about the same time. He’s so much more diplomatic than I am.

A number of people have forwarded various links to me today on the subject of announced job cuts at Microsoft… many accompanied by comments to the effect of “enjoy”, “good news” and “this will make you smile”.

Actually it doesn’t make me smile and to be honest I don’t think it’s good news. Winning against Microsoft, taking out Exchange and replacing with Domino, hearing that a company is looking at throwing out Office in favour of Symphony… that makes me smile, and that’s only natural in the market we compete in. Most of the time we compete fairly, and I know many people at Microsoft who I have worked with in the past, and I like and respect them. I bumped into one here at Lotusphere – I shook his hand and spent a few minutes talking about things we were doing (great to see you Tony). We may trade snipes on a blog next week, but we’ll know it’s healthy competitive debate.

When a powerful technology company like Microsoft announces job cuts it’s not a good sign and it’s not good for the industry. It’s also not good for the people effected who have to pay mortgages and support families. So anyone sending me an e-mail expecting me to be smug and punch the air, you’ll be disappointed. IBM posted good results, but we should all be aware how fragile the economy is.