the corner office

There's been some heated discussion over the past week about the state of the Notes/Domino market (eg. in response to blog entries from Carl Tyler, Volker Weber and Ed Brill, and a follow-up from Rocky Oliver, and others), and that has also segued into other discussions around the merits and demerits of Lotus Workplace (more at vowe.net and viz also Greyhawk68's experiences).

I don't really have an opinion about the Notes market - it seems fairly flat, but not dead, locally. If lots of people are saying business is great and lots of other people are saying it's grim, then the truth is probably somewhere in between. More thoughts on that another time maybe. The discussion around Workplace is fairly intriguing though. I haven't played with it, so I can't say how cool it is or isn't. It certainly sounds incredibly promising, particularly when it comes to the possibilities of the Eclipse RCP and what that will mean for next-gen rich client apps - within or outside a Notes paradigm.

Apart from residual uncertainty and unhappiness from the original Notes vs Workplace confusion, the major gripe still seems to be that Workplace is a monster. To install... getting better, but still not there. Tangentially, there's something people allude to and what I think is the real problem: you can't bang it onto an old PIII or whatever in your home office and play around with it. You can do that with Domino, and with Tomcat, and MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and Apache, and PHP and ditto for lots of MS stuff. The software is essentially free, and accessible, and you can get stuck in on a Sunday afternoon and grok what those platforms and environments do and what they can offer you. And in this modern day and age, this is why there are strong developer communities and ecosystems around all these cheap and accessible chunks of software. They have fsck-aroundability.

But when you need machines with heaps of gigs of RAM and multiple CPUs just to get a slow proof-of-concept environment going, you're talking about big-ass enterprise software, and that's another baby entirely. Nobody runs SAP at home, not many people have AS/400's running in their basements. People don't do pet projects on Websphere servers and blogs aren't persisted into DB2 backends. That's not a good or bad thing per se, that's just the nature of the beast; these systems have different things to offer (although a lack of fsck-aroundability is a disadvantage). I just think some of the disillusionment happens because people are expecting Workplace to be as lean and accessible as something like Domino, and it's not, and maybe never will be.

A side issue is just why a platform needs that much memory and CPU power when other platforms get you 80% or 90% or even 100% of the way there for a tenth of the resource requirements, but that's another story.