Having read all the posts here, I think I pretty well agree with everyone, and I feel sorry for those folks who are committed to life as a developer in a large company or government department.
Brookstone Technologies started out life as a Notes development shop and did pretty well until IBM's dance of death with workplace (I refuse to give it the dignity of a capital W) just about killed our business and effectively ensured that any customers that were thinking about switching to Microsoft did just that, regardless of cost.
OK, so enough negativity.
We mortgaged houses and created the VirtualOffice solution.
We now focus completely on this Domino/Notes based solution sell and to my absolute amazement have discovered that, having seen a solution that solves a whole bunch of their problems and is designed for their business, business owners really not only don't care what it runs on but hardly ever ask.
We do focus on the SMB space around CRM and Service Industries (plumbers electricians etc), but there are thousands of them, so we don't care about the massively big sites. I'll leave them to IBM.
Our business is growing, 80% of it is Domino and we're moving it to the cloud. Now not only does SMB not care what a solution runs, but if it is delivered via the cloud, it's even less relevant.
I'm not too interested in Connections, Sametime or Quickr as my small business clients aren't interested and these are not really relevant to them.
We deliver a solution that fixes company's problems, that we can make changes to quickly and that we can make look pretty if we want to (we generally don't though as our customers prefer speed to flashy graphics). Oh and in nearly every instance we replace whatever email system they have running with Notes.
Our clients love a specific solution, they love the look and feel of Notes 8.5.1, they especially love Lotus Traveler and iNotes, and couldn't care less about anything else.
Having read all the posts here, I think I pretty well agree with everyone, and I feel sorry for those folks who are committed to life as a developer in a large company or government department.
Brookstone Technologies started out life as a Notes development shop and did pretty well until IBM's dance of death with workplace (I refuse to give it the dignity of a capital W) just about killed our business and effectively ensured that any customers that were thinking about switching to Microsoft did just that, regardless of cost.
OK, so enough negativity.
We mortgaged houses and created the VirtualOffice solution.
We now focus completely on this Domino/Notes based solution sell and to my absolute amazement have discovered that, having seen a solution that solves a whole bunch of their problems and is designed for their business, business owners really not only don't care what it runs on but hardly ever ask.
We do focus on the SMB space around CRM and Service Industries (plumbers electricians etc), but there are thousands of them, so we don't care about the massively big sites. I'll leave them to IBM.
Our business is growing, 80% of it is Domino and we're moving it to the cloud. Now not only does SMB not care what a solution runs, but if it is delivered via the cloud, it's even less relevant.
I'm not too interested in Connections, Sametime or Quickr as my small business clients aren't interested and these are not really relevant to them.
We deliver a solution that fixes company's problems, that we can make changes to quickly and that we can make look pretty if we want to (we generally don't though as our customers prefer speed to flashy graphics). Oh and in nearly every instance we replace whatever email system they have running with Notes.
Our clients love a specific solution, they love the look and feel of Notes 8.5.1, they especially love Lotus Traveler and iNotes, and couldn't care less about anything else.