Right, and I think that might be the problem where Tim's perception plays
out... we only only only talk about WebSphere Portal at Lotusphere, not the 50
other products in the WebSphere family.

Fair enough. WAS (Websphere Application Server) plus DB2 but no Portal layered
on top for those.

I'm so jaundiced WRT Websphere that I don't really take the time to
differentiate any more. The minute a Lotus product goes to a requirement for
WAS for any functionality at all, I drop it like a bad potato. I've gone into
why that is elsewhere so I will skip it here.

Hi Rob -

When I say 'disrespect for the platform' it is shorthand for a lot more than
just "religious preference" and it goes back to real product decisions made
long before it was about WAS. Almost since day 1 with Sametime, Domino was a
platform of convenience and the party line from that team was about keeping the
part of it that made it special from being truly tied down to that particular
choice.

One if the biggest and loudest arguments I ever had with anyone at IBM by way
of forums and so on, was with someone (Barbara Bowan, maybe?) on the Sametime
team years back. They had declared that they'd blackboxed the version of
Domino used as a platform for Sametime and that they didn't have any need to
keep up with the releases of Domino, to support the native directory structure,
or to make Sametime behave according to the way acl's and so on worked for the
rest of the product. In fact, they'd only picked Domino as a server platform
"for now" since it had "a set of services we needed all packaged up in one set"
but that in the future they may not use Domino as the base at all.
Essentially, Domino was a choice of convenience and not the intended direction.

I had railed back that "Yes, that's the point. The Domino server provides all
these great services and makes a fantastic platform to build on." I predicted
that Sametime would stay on that platform (I've been right for what, 10 years
so far?); that it would be a mistake to fail to keep the server version in
line and updated along with the Domino server itself (which also proved
correct, though it took several years for Lotus to come back around to this);
and finally, I predicted that trying to build it on J2EE (and thus WAS) was an
utter waste of time as the J2EE platform is massively overpriced, over
complicated, and not well matched to a development team's needs. This was at
that time when the analysts had predicted insanely over the top revenue in both
licenses and services around j2ee and EVERYONE was supposed to be rushing
toward it.

I'll stand by those predictions and arguments today, 10 years or more later.
Sametime on Domino is still an interesting product. The ability to house your
chat and meeting software internally and integrate it with your messaging and
calendaring infrastructure overcomes the commoditization of the market for
those services just enough to make it worth deploying in larger, more security
or compliance conscious companies. The licensing bears that out. The
Advanced Server and Enterprise thing (whatever its called today) have a
reputation as being incredibly expensive to put in place and nearly impossible
to install and manage.

Based on this and more, I'll stand by my statement. As a team, the Sametime
group has continuously not played well in the sandbox with the rest of the
Domino community. I'll expand it to say that recently, they don't seem to be
playing well in the sandbox with themselves. Between Sametime, Sametime
Advanced, Sametime Untie, and that other offering that I can't recall if I'm
under NDA about or not; this is a product line that seems to be in competition
with itself as much as with anyone else, and in a space already crowded with
free or cheap alternatives.

Do we even want to go anywhere near the cost of deploying a Sametime server
tied with telephony through Portal? Can it even be done in a reference case
that doesn't price out at over 100k in hardware and software? All that to
compete with functionality I've already got running in production using free
and open source tools?

As far as WAS being a "fast growing" market segment for IBM and a good business
opportunity for your product team, I couldn't begin to agree less. Its easy to
have high percentage growth in a market your not already saturating. Its quite
another to quote percentages of real companies out there willing to spend the
money for it. The minute you add WAS as a requirement, you exclude based on
price and complexity a very very large number of organizations. Basically, you
exclude the entire SMB world with the exception of some of the manufacturing
supplier companies in the upper mid-west that are forced to levels of I.T.
complexity by the big auto industry requirement for EDI.

J2EE is proof that if you throw enough money and sales presence behind even the
worst strategy you can mature it enough to sell some of it to some people. The
vast majority of what it is good for can be just as easily done on cheap or
free software. The rest serves the sole purpose of making big lock-in license
revenue and massive services revenue for the few big vendors in that space. I
won't treat my customers like that.

Calling it a "religious" choice is to me the same thing as branding those of us
who don't buy the whole "Portal" and "WAS for everything" strategy as a bunch
of "Treehuggers". Its a badge to wear with a great deal of pride, frankly.