Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Put the Outlook Killer in Eclipse
Steve O’Grady pointed out that the importance of Outlook as the center of most info-workers day-life gives Outlook a strong position in the “messaging” market. (”Messaging” always seemed liked a silly term. “Email” would be more clear and concise. But, who am I to pull the abstractionist buzz-word crafters down from the ceiling?)
Or, put another way: there’s little chance that Workplace/Notes (I’m not too clear on the distinction between the two at this level of discussion) is going to beat Outlook for email eyeballs and dollars. Everyone uses the Outlook.
Closed Protocols Are a Dead-End
One of the great suggestions he makes is that Workplace/Notes should be a normal email client: one that can pull email from POP and IMAP, instead of requiring the Workplace back-end as an email server. Furthermore, this POP/IMAP enabled client could be given away for (near) free as a standalone email client.
And thus, you’d have a go at the viral spread of a new email client: given that (a.) it’s s better than (in usability, price, maintenance, or all 3) Outlook, and, (b.) as I’ve mentioned before, works well with Exchange/Outlook, you’d get, (c.) despite the slow turn-over of corporate IT, the actual end-users may decide that it’s time to dump Microsoft for IBM by voting with their email clients.
Getting the Vanguard
Now, as Steve points out, email clients aren’t quite sexy enough to rely on your bread-and-butter white-collar to get all excited about switching: Outlook is just fine for them, they’re not going to get all into the feature differentiation of clients like folks will over IM (though, that’s another segment of the “messaging” market that’s easily disrupted if you can figure out the best whiz for your bang; so far, no whiz’ers).
With all that lay-up, here’s the punch-line: my idea for getting that early majority is to make Workplace/Notes into an Eclipse “plugin” that the legions of Eclipse Java developers can install and start using:
- Many, many, many Java developers use Eclipse: Forrester put the number around 75% of all Java developers. So, Eclipse has a huge install base.
- Most Java developers (the legions of coders left over after the Ruby Exodus) work in shops that use Exchange/Outlook.
- Java coders don’t have much brand-loyalty to Microsoft. They have even less care about Outlook. That is, they’re easy targets for switching.
- Given all this, if there was an Eclipse plugin for reading Email that worked just as well as Outlook for email and calendaring, IBM would seem to have a pretty good contender for an Outlook killer. Us programmers love “living in” our IDE’s, so we’re already down with the idea of jamming more functionality and screen time into our tools.
That is, while there’s certainly power in using the Eclipse platform to build an email client, I think there’s a better chance for rapid success by putting an email client into Eclipse.
Of course, once you win over the Java folks, you have to move through the rest of the curve…see vital, penultimate step in the list below.
Putting More Blood Into the Stone
And once Outlook is taken over, it’s a case of kill the head and the body will die: the Exchange servers that is. Just imagine how many millions there are in Exchange and Outlook licenses. If IBM got just 5-10% of that, they’d get themselves some good revenue; compare Firefox’s rapid, but still small share of the browser market and how much everyone freaks out (in a good way) about that small amount vs. IE.
Even better with all that room to grow, they’d have some easy growth points on their hands to pump into their quarterly numbers. That is, once you’ve saturated the market for a given product, it’s hard to grow it, and if you can’t grow it, you can’t feed your shareholder’s insatiable hunger for growth, and that lot starts looking for something different, dumping the growth-stymied party at the curb. It’s the more blood from the stone problem.
Of course, at a place as big as IBM, it may just be a blip, but it’d be a high-profile blip.
The Plan
So, here’s the plan:
- Make Workplace/Notes work with POP/IMAP…if it doesn’t already.
- Make Workplace/Notes work perfectly (90-95% so) with Exchange, esp. with calendaring, i.e., scheduling and accepting invites to meetings…if it doesn’t already.
- Create a Eclipse plugin that wraps up all of the above.
- Give the plugin to the Eclipse Java Community.
- ???
- Profit!
I, for one, would welcome my new messaging overlord.
Update: for some reason, this post gets a shit-load of SPAM comments. So, I’ve closed down comments. Feel free to email me if you want to talk about it.
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December 23rd, 2005 at 1:45 am
windows/microsoft/outlook all suck.
what does outlook have that gmail doesn’t?
December 23rd, 2005 at 2:08 am
Good question.
Outlook has:
A shared calander
An integrated back-end that you can play with (Exchange). For example, try setting up an auditing system with GMail. The GOOG isn’t going to let you mess with it.
Related to the above: GMail isn’t controlled by the IT department.
Keeping all the data on your own servers.
IT department mindshare, valid or not. Try telling the Fortune 1xxx IT heads “we’re just going to use GMail for email,” and you’ll get some strange looks.
As usual, these things don’t really matter unless you want them to. Or, in the case of the example in the second, you’re operating under regulations…or, your legal team’s interpretation of the regulations.
The idea that GMail would be just fine is quite sound. Steve Gillmor gets into pounding this point home in his psuedo-Socratic style from time-to-time on his podcasts. the only missing part is calendaring.
If you haven’t used Outlook/Exchange’s calendaring, it doesn’t stand out as a killer feature, but that’s really the only (so far) undefeated reason to use Outlook/Exchange.
Really, though, most of the companies out there could dump whatever email system they’re using and shift over the gmail, and everything would be fine. Most of the concerns above are just left over effects of the aging shrink-wrap software mindset. GMail, and other online emails, are great examples of Software as a Service: that is, software you (companies) treat more like electricity: you don’t have “Chief Electricity Officers” or “Electricity Departments,” you just have outlets and you pay your power bill every month. That is, you don’t have to pay for, run, and patch Exchange servers and Outlook clients; your employees just type in gmail.com and go.
December 24th, 2005 at 9:16 am
> Try telling the Fortune 1xxx IT heads
> “we’re just going to use GMail for email,”
> and you’ll get some strange looks.
I think that there are two forces that want to keep the mail inside the firewall and locked down and out of the hands of The Google Monster. The first force is the IT Nazi’s, as you have described. The second force is likely more powerful than than the first, as they wield the power of FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT. The Chief Counsel and the ubiquitous legal team would never allow all of those incriminating email messages to be hosted on the same servers being constantly rummaged through by Googles Search Engines!
December 25th, 2005 at 1:44 am
># Make Workplace/Notes work with POP/IMAP…if it doesn’t already.
It does. It has for something like 8 or 10 years.
># Make Workplace/Notes work perfectly (90-95% so) with Exchange, esp. with calendaring, i.e., scheduling and accepting invites to meetings…if it doesn’t already.
Can’t say it’s perfect. Meeting invites do tend to work these days (depending on what versions you have installed on both sides), but AFAIK there’s no interoperability for viewing calandars or doing free-time queries. That’s not necessarily IBM’s fault, however. There have to be standards and APIs exposed in order for there to be interoperability.
# Create a Eclipse plugin that wraps up all of the above.
Ummm… that was announced about a year ago. Mabye more. It’s not released yet, but it should be soon. IBM has also announced “Hannover”, a.k.a. Notes 7.5, which will be a better integrated Eclipse-based Notes client, installed as one product. And as an added benefit: it brings the Notes client to Linux for the first time — without WINE.
# Give the plugin to the Eclipse Java Community.
When it’s released ;-)
December 26th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
Chris: I think you’re absolutly right. There’s a huge mental block about allowing data past your firewall. I recall when iPods and USB drives started get popular that IT people (or the trade rags at least) started freaking out about employees downloading all the super-secret data and “walking out the door” with it.
Richard: thanks for all the info. It sounds like it’ll be exciting times for Notes/Workplace. Could you clear up the difference between the two? I seem to have conflated them in my head, but I know there’s a difference.
December 26th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
I’m not an IBMer, so I can’t speak with authority as to future product plans, but after a couple of years of really confusing messages from IBM what’s emerged in the past 18 or so months is this: Workplace does not replace Notes. Notes is part of Workplace. There’s another part of Workplace that is/was called Workplace Messaging, but it was never intended to displace Notes. It was aimed at low-need user populations that otherwise would not have email access at all. E.g., factory floor workers, retail store workers for nationwide chains, etc. (This part of the message from IBM, by the way, was actually very clear right from the start, but a lot of people either weren’t paying attention, or were deflected by FUD.) Notes will continue its independent existence for longer than any of us can make useful predictions about technology. Its on 7 now, and they’re talking about at least as far as version 10 at the moment, and that’s going to be past 2010. But Notes will evolve over time, to also offer the opportunity — for those that want it — to participate in the managed component environment that is what Workplace is all about. Don’t ask me what that part means though… the Hannover release will be an initial step toward it, but common sense says it’s going to be a moving target.
That’s my understanding of it, anyhow. Hope it helps.
December 28th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
Thanks for the reply Richard, that clears it up a bit. I work in enterprise software myself, so with that explanation, I can get a clearer picture of how the (it seems) “umbrella concept”/platform of Workplace related to the product/features of Notes. As always in that sphere, however, all the different concept-ware is usually vague enough to be easily molded into whatever needs the dudes with the bags of cash want to hear…nonetheless, that’s a concrete enough explanation for me ;>