Lotus Notes Vs WordPress
Folks complained that the last post did not include an apples to apples comparison. Here’s a second cut.
Google Trends shows that more people are searching on WordPress than are searching on Lotus Notes.
In a related note, even IBM employees are going Web 2.0. Susan Scrupski has an interesting article out today on Atlassian.
[Mike] Cannon-Brookes told me the firm has well over a hundred thousand users on the product, and they’re prepping to announce a “scalable” solution (Confluence Massive) that will boost the company’s capacity to handle large accounts. Even today, he said, “IBM has over 15,000 users on the product.”
Maybe that explains the Alexholic results which show that Wordpress.com and Typepad.com both have more traffic than all of IBM, including the #1 Google ranked Lotus Notes site.
Does search mind share and web traffic indicate who has the best product? I’m not sure. Perhaps it is an indication of the “wisdom of the crowd”. Traffic and search results indicate interest.
People searching for “WordPress” are clearly search for the blogging platform.
To draw a parallel with my journalism and training life: it’s easy for startups to claim ‘rapid growth’ because they’re starting from zero.
I get the same feelings about these charts. They invoke a ’so?’ in me. Your final comment is correct. Active interest in old stuff would decay at the same time that interest in new stuff increases.
It doesn’t alter the reality on the ground which is that the penetration of the old stuff is huge while the new stuff is marginal.
Given the date, think of a pumpkin with a few surface blemishes. These could turn into some pumpkin-eating disease, but we’re a long way from that yet.
Hi David,
Thank you for the comment.
I think interest has to do with innovation. If you look at the same graphs for Apple, which is a very old company (in tech years), the search and traffic interest is going up.
People are more interested in new Vs. old.
What these graphs say is that, at least from a public preception point of view, Lotus Notes is not coming out with anything that is new and interesting. That is a serious problem for IBM.
Considering that computers are swapped out every 24 months, and people are used to 5 year upgrade cycles for big old systems, the value of an installed system can go down pretty quickly.
Maybe that is the answer to the question of “so what?”
- Rod
Change goes through four phases:
1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Appraisal/Trial
4. Adoption
What we are seeing are real trends of increasing awareness for Wordpress and Typepad. Would this materialize into Interest, Trial and Adoption? If yes, how long will it take? What is the rate of conversion from Awareness to eventual Adoption? How many customers are buying these products?
On the other hand, IBM’s Lotus Notes is an established product with established markets. A better way to compare (if you must) is to take a look at the total awareness of unique users for Lotus Notes over the the last five to ten years. Also, what has been the eventual adoption of Notes? And is Notes growing today? How much new business it is generating?
Agreed that the current trend points to increasing awareness for rival products. And it has the potential of causing disruption in the future. You could also argue that it is a Wake-up call for IBM and Lotus.
For instance, I talked today about Adidas versus Nike in a similar situation wherein the new kid is trying to go up against an established Leader.
WordPress is something that individual consumers research, download, install, configure, customize, troubleshoot, and use on their own. When they need information about it, they google.
Lotus Notes is something that IT departments research, acquire, install, configure, customize, troubleshoot, and support for communities of dozens, hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of users. When users need information about it, they can easily search through thousands of pages of help information that come with the product, or they can call their help desk. When the help desk needs information they search their support knowledgebase, and if they can’t find the answer they escalate to dedicated internal Notes support staff, or to their IBM business partner. And if the internal support or business partner staff needs information, they search IBM’s support web site, and the IBM partner forum, the forums on IBM’s developerWorks site, they read the free RedBooks that they download from IBM, or they call IBM’s support line. Somewhere along the line they might google, and sometimes the search string will contain the string “Lotus Notes”, but it might just include “Lotus”, it might just include “Notes” or it might include “Domino”.
Hi Richard,
As always, thank you very much for the comment.
This time, I am afraid it sounds like you are grasping at straws here.
It is not clear to me that searching through 1,000s of pages of help, is that better than getting directly to the answer using Google.
You should know that Google isn’t the only source of information on products like WordPress. Check out the WordPress Codex
If you go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Special:Allpages, there are 480 help topics.
But, that is just the beginning, with over 20 million people using WordPress, there are many more, all conveniently organized by Google.
I have an open challenge for you. Please direct me to an IBM Lotus Notes help site that is as useful, as easy and as attractive at the WordPress Codex.
- Rod
No fair on the challenge, Rod! IBM doesn’t do attractive ;-)
But here are a couple of URLs:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/support/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/lotus/library.jsp
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/community/
Anyhow, I stand on my point: end users don’t Google for help with Notes. They call their help desk.
As for searching through thousands of pages of IBM’s help files for Lotus Notes and Domino, Rod… it’s as simple as Google. Lotus has had full text searching in their product since the early 90’s — long before Google was around — and they use it in their help system. So, instead of starting up a browser, a Notes user just selects “Help Topics” from the Help menu of the Notes client, Designer, or Admin client. Instead of typing “www.google.com” (or clicking a bookmark, or clicking into the help box in your browser), a Notes user clicks on “Search”. Then in both cases, the user enters a query and sifts through results. And in the case of a Notes user querying the Notes help files, there’s no searching through irrelevant material, material that refers to older or newer versions of the product than what you happen to be using, or erroneous info posted by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
“Please direct me to an IBM Lotus Notes help site that is as useful, as easy and as attractive at the WordPress Codex.”
Am I supposed to be impressed because WordPress uses large serif fonts or something? There’s nothing particularly dazzling about that design.