Tuesday, February 25, 2003

GROUPWARE, THE NEXT GENERATION: I'm surprised that IBM doesn't see the emerging threat to its flagship Lotus Notes product is the new generation of products that engender collaboration very easily from within existing products such as Outlook. I'm referring to products such as Groove and Kubi. Groove and Kubi take existing, prevalent applications such as Microsoft Outlook and the Notes client for granted and build their layer on top of those apps. In effect, the applications that have been commoditized, such as e-mail and office productivity apps are the new operating systems. IBM doesn't seem to understand this space and still pursues Notes as a profit center. This is strange because the one area that IBM gets this approach is with its WebSphere product line, which it practically gives away to make money on services bolted on top of the WebSphere stack. I wonder if this is continuing evidence that IBM doesn't really get client (personal) computing. Microsoft gets it (as usual) and coordinates tightly with Groove. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft eventually acquires Groove much the same way IBM swallowed up Lotus oh so many years ago.

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