Fun_People Archive
6 Jan
HTMOTW (Home Town Memo Of The Week - for the Seattle Metro Area)

Date: Thu,  6 Jan 94 13:45:36 PST
To: Fun_People
Subject: HTMOTW (Home Town Memo Of The Week - for the Seattle Metro Area)

[I have a few questions about this memo:
    (+) is it for real?
    (+) what is "mindshare"?
    (+) is this the way marketing is usually done?
    (+) wasn't "mission-critical" last year's buzzword?
    (+) is verbifying "architect" worse that coining "marketecture"?
    (+) is this memo really, really for real?

I guess I've just led a sheltered life, working for film moguls, large Wall
Street law firms and The Phone Company, where everybody is so nicey-nice... -psl]

 From: Keith Bostic <vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU!bostic>
 From: uunet!microsoft.com!billg
 Send-To: uunet!microsoft.com!steveb uunet!microsoft.com!jonl 
uunet!microsoft.com!pameds uunet!microsoft.com!nathanm

	During the past few months, I have grown increasingly 
uncomfortable with our collective response to the threat of Notes.  
While the positioning of this product was essentially botched by 
Lotus during the first several years of its existence, it has noneth
eless gained tremendous significance in the eyes of both the industry 
and our major customers.  While it remains the situation that few can 
tell you what Notes actually is, customers now spontaneously think of 
Notes when the words "workgroup" or "groupware" are mentioned.  What 
comes to *your* mind when "groupware" is mentioned?

	When Notes had less visibility and was being ineffectively 
marketed, it was much easier for us to dismiss the situation as a 
temporary phenomenon that we could effectively combat in any of a 
number of ways, from either our systems or applications efforts.  
However, Lotus has now gained the moral high ground in the industry 
with Notes, as clearly demonstrated by the rise of their stock over 
the course of the year.  In the eyes of the press and analysts, this 
product can do no wrong, even with all of its obvious weaknesses.

	The situation now appears to be out of our control; as you 
well know, virtually every one of our major corporate accounts has 
cornered one of you and asked how our applications will work with 
Notes.  Due to clever marketing, Lotus has positioned Notes in these 
customers' minds as a "platform", convincing them that it has some 
kind of underlying architecture that resembles system software.  
Although we've estimated that Lotus has only sold about 350,000 
copies worldwide, the high acceptance rate of Notes within our major 
accounts is extremely disturbing.  These are the only people who care 
about systems architecture; if we fail to capture their mindshare, do 
you have any idea how expensive it will be to regain it?

	Between Lotus' mindshare and Novell's network dominance, I am 
concerned that our enterprise strategy message is being reduced to 
irrelevance in many accounts.  Our success to date has been a result 
of selling desktop operating systems and desktop applications, but I 
must reinforce that moving forward, whoever owns the network 
infrastructure will increasingly own the desktop applications.  
Customers are increasingly looking toward single-vendor solutions.  
Since Novell doesn't have applications, this means that Notes could 
lead to increased sales of cc:Mail and other Lotus products.  We MUST 
control the infrastructure moving forward or we will fail to give our 
applications the leverage that they need for continued success!

	But as we learned when launching WFW, it has proven 
surprisingly dangerous for us to publicly assail Notes.  
Notes-bashing is not a sensible solution, first because we can't risk 
alienating our major accounts who have already embraced the product, 
and second because we don't currently provide an acceptable 
alternative.  We must take an indirect approach to the problem, 
positioning it as an isolated application and as complementary to our 
products.  The "one-two punch" of our Anti-Notes message must be 1) t
o disarm the situation by complimenting Notes on the desktop, 
demonstrating how well the product integrates with Microsoft desktop 
applications through standard Microsoft technologies such as OLE and 
MAPI, and 2) to introduce uncertainty in the customer by making it 
very clear that our systems infrastructure is much more robust than 
Notes will ever be, that they don't have any experience with systems 
or infrastructure, and that there will be no need for their back-end 
once our systems are in place.

	In short, make the customer feel OK that he made both the 
Notes purchase decision and the Microsoft Office purchase decision, 
but make him think very carefully about enterprise-wide deployment.  
If, by these tactics, we can delay enterprise-wide adoption of Notes 
in our major accounts by a measurable degree, the probabilities will 
be high that the customer will then force Lotus to rework Notes to 
work on top of our infrastructure.  Thus, while Notes will still 
exist on the desktop, we will have won the enterprise computing 
infrastructure.  And once Notes is contained on the desktop, it will 
fail on its own due to its inherent lack of top-end programming 
capabilities, as compared to our own desktop strategy.

	In summary, here are the 10 Anti-Notes Commandments that you 
and your people should memorize:

I	Notes is a good Windows product, and a great OLE application 
that works exceedingly well with all applications in the Microsoft 
Office suite.  But be careful when using it with Lotus OLE-enabled 
products, because we're told that they require "back doors" around 
OLE in order to be useful when used with Notes.

II	As an application development environment, Notes is 
extremely weak.  It lacks a true programming language, is not 
transscriptable, and you have to drop into "C" in order to do 
anything useful.

III	Because of its 16-bit heritage, Notes is rife with 64K 
limits that show up to the user in very inconvenient ways.  The 
32-bit version of Notes is simply a recompiled 16-bit version, and 
still has all of these limitations!

IV	Notes isn't architected for the enterprise.  Dating back to 
1984, it was designed for little workgroups to be connected by phone 
lines, not for an enterprise with tens of thousands of users.

V	Notes duplicates many of the functions that are in the 
operating system, such as Mail, Directory and Security.  Since the 
weak point of any secure system is in its management by humans, 
incompatible duplicate security subsystems and directories result not 
only in additional management cost, but also weakened security.

VI	Lotus as a company doesn't know how to build or support 
large-scale systems.  The back-end of a distributed object store 
should be built and supported by a company that already supports tens 
of millions of operating system users, not by a company whose only 
claim to fame is a spreadsheet.

VII	Lotus sells two messaging products, cc:Mail and Notes, 
that work in completely different and incompatible manners.  While 
they have finally seemed to have learned the art of "marketecture" 
with their LCS announcement, slides should not be confused with a 
well-architected product.  MAPI and the other WOSA service provider 
interfaces already have the support of hundreds of third-party 
developers, and will work flawlessly with EMS and all of Microsoft's 
future operating systems.

VIII	The Notes Server has proven to be a pitiful performer on 
OS/2, but we've heard that it runs extraordinarily well on 
Windows/NT.  Because Notes has no built-in support for managing large 
numbers of servers, we'd suggest that if you plan on deploying Notes 
servers, you use Windows/NT in conjunction with Hermes in order to do 
distributed systems management.

IX	Cairo has a distributed, replicated object store that is 
much more robust, efficient, and scaleable than Notes, and in 
addition it's an open system having been built on DCE RPC.  DEC is 
working with us to ensure that our distributed object technology is 
portable to other vendors' environments.

X	The fact that Lotus is working on many incompatible code 
streams for Notes on multiple platforms is stretching Lotus past its 
limits.  It has already caused them to miss schedule milestones a 
number of times, and thus be an unreliable supplier of software.  
Notes' support of multiple platforms is not unique - all of 
Microsoft's applications are programmed to the Win/32 API, and will 
port to Unix, Macintosh, and OS/2 with a simple recompile.

	Finally, here's a quick-reference guide that can be used to 
make potential clients nervous or insecure about Notes, while not 
alienating them in case they actually do buy Notes:

1.	Remember that, in the presence of a client, you should 
always "be apparently respectful" to Notes, especially if that client 
is a major account.

2.	Always focus on how well Microsoft Office applications work 
with Notes because Notes was an OLE pioneer, working very closely 
with Microsoft.  Always add that the other Lotus applications were 
"followers", and have always had abysmal OLE support.

3.	Use a number of methods to introduce uncertainty about the 
"back end" in the customer's mind.  The following have been tested 
and are known to work:

a.	They have a directory, but I've heard that it doesn't scale 
to the size of your organization, and the one in Notes Version 3 was 
rewritten and has problems.

b.	Due to the large Microsoft development community, we 
already know that virtually every vendor of messaging programs, 
systems and services are working on Microsoft EMS integration.  I'm 
really not sure yet how Lotus is going to integrate with EMS.

c.	The Notes security stuff was good when it was developed, 
but that was in 1984.  And I've heard that they've had some security 
problems lately - related to the fact that it wasn't in the operating 
system.

d.	The biggest problems people seem to have with Notes is in 
getting support from Lotus.  The integrators who install Notes seem 
incapable of dealing with any but the simplest of problems, and Lotus 
itself is very slow at problem resolution - they clearly don't 
understand what it takes to run a mission-critical enterprise system!

e.	The next version of NT, Cairo, has a fully *replicated*, 
distributed object file system, and I'm not yet sure how Lotus is 
going to integrate with it.  A very large development community is 
already working with the prerelease development kits.  You really 
should ask Lotus about it.

4.	If you're sure that they're going to install Notes (or 
already have bought it), make sure that you pitch NT as the preferred 
server environment.  Once NT is "in the door", it will be much easier 
for us to supplant Notes on the back-end with NT Version 2 (Cairo).

	"I'm sure that you've heard that the Notes Server is a dog on 
OS/2, but they've been working with NT for years and it's a screamer, 
especially due to the SMP support." 

	"Yes, I've heard that the NLM is faster, but it's VERY 
unstable and can't scale due to the lack of SMP."

	"Because Notes is difficult to manage remotely, you can use 
Hermes to manage your Notes Servers."

	Finally, lest you feel that we're only dealing with Notes 
with words, let me remind you of our current technical efforts, on 
both the systems side as well as in applications:

SYSTEMS

-	EMS will be a combination back-end message router and 
distributed client/server message store.  It will have both public 
and private relational "message databases", similar to Notes forums, 
that can be fully replicated with other EMS systems.  Message da
tabases are customizable, and front-end tools are included to permit 
the user to construct "conferencing" and other shared message store 
applications.  It has a tremendously impressive message store, 
directory, and routing administration tool known as "Mailbeat", 
public key security, and native X.400 and X.500 support.  We will be 
bundling EMS with every copy of NT Advanced Server and Cairo on a 
permanent basis starting at first shipment of EMS.  You should think 
of EMS as the "back-end companion" to Chicago.

-	Chicago will finally eliminate any reason to buy a 
Macintosh.  It will have an impressive object-oriented UI, integrated 
networking, integrated VB, integrated rich text editor, integrated 
Mail and Messaging, full MAPI 1 support with integrated service pr
oviders for out-of-the-box communications with CompuServe, EasyLink, 
America OnLine, and MicroServe, our new on-line service.  Chicago 
will make extensive use of OLE2 in the "shell", creating the 
appearance of a seamless system.  Chicago, combined with integrated 
mail, VB, and rich text editor, with NT and EMS on the back-end, 
should give nobody any more *practical* reason to purchase Notes in 
order to build distributed workgroup applications.

-	Windows NT Version 2, or Cairo, is a completely 
object-oriented back-end.  The user-perceivable benefit is to extend 
the notion of a fully replicated message store back-end, achieved in 
EMS, to the entire file system.  Wherein Chicago was the perfect OLE2 
front-end, Cairo will be the perfect OLE2 back-end.

APPLICATIONS

-	VBA is being enhanced to have full VB functionality, and 
will be present in all Office applications.  Included in this 
functionality is a set of EMS "controls" that include not only 
message store and directory traversal, but also routing and 
delegation controls.

-	VBA is being enhanced so that VBA applications themselves 
are stored inside of "standard containers".  As a result, VBA 
applications can be fully distributed using either the EMS or Cairo 
replicated message and object stores.

-	Office will continue to provide the best OLE2 container 
support in the industry.

-	We will be producing a "Chicago Office" suite to counter any 
potential Notes-based suite threat.  After installation, all Office 
applications will have apparent "shell-level" integration.

Good luck, and please keep me informed as to your progress.

Bill

© 1994 Peter Langston