After evaluating the Notes/Domino 8.0.1 release, I found a few things which should be really fixed and done before doing anything else:
- Domino 8.0.1 64-bit support for NSFDB2. Currently it destroys DB/2 databases and permanently destroys the DB/2 interface too, so it has to be reinstalled for Domino 8.0.1 32-bit.
- Symbian support for Notes Traveller. Nobody really uses Windows Mobile devices (vanishing 12%), the vast majority on earth uses Symbian devices (65% market share).
- Symbian support for Domino Web Access Lite (or even Domino Web Access Full). Currenty neither works with any business phone: Nokia Communicator 9210, 9300, 9500, E90.
- Native Basic All Client for Linux: Lotus Notes, Domino Designer, Domino Administrator. Currently only Notes Standard Client works on Linux, and even there the implementation of Eclipse is horribly slow.
IBM has a clear business case here: Basic All Client for Linux reduces the Total Cost of Ownership even 3 times:
1) Basic Clients vs Standard Clients hardware needs
2) Linux and it's applications hardware needs
3) License fees for Windows (and also the cost for solving problems caused by Windows).
|
|
| | Anonymous
Thursday, 21 February 2008 23:30:39 EET |
| | I disagree on almost all counts.
|
|
|
| | Mika
Friday, 22 February 2008 00:05:09 EET |
| | How can you disagree on facts? Like that Domino 64-bit is not supported on DB/2, or that DWA does not work on Nokia Communicators, or that Traveller does not work on Symbian, or that Notes Standard is slow on Linux? Or... basically you can't disagree on anything I said.
|
|
|
| | Brian Green
Friday, 22 February 2008 00:48:15 EET |
| | Rob Wunderlich posted a nice chart on Symbian's market share.
Page 26
http://www.dominounplugged.com/Hosting/dominounplugged/home2.nsf/dx/BP211.pdf/$file/BP211.pdf
|
|
|
| | Mika
Friday, 22 February 2008 01:39:23 EET |
| | Wow that's really impressive, the Symbian market is way bigger than I could have ever imagined, and the only competitor is Linux.
Oh LOL, only North America, a country amongst 140 other countries in the world has different shares compared to the rest of the world :)
IBM really needs to decide if they make products for the whole world, for North America, for Mongolia, or any other random country only.
I'm making products for the whole world, and it's really simple and easy. Using the ISO9000 standard, you can unify all countries and their special settings, and nobody will ever complain.
Been there, done that.
|
|
|
| | Stuart McIntyre
Friday, 22 February 2008 01:42:30 EET |
| | Mika, in general I tend to agree with your view on things but very rarely on the way you make your case (e.g. I am a real AIX bigot, and love the pSeries platform, but know that there is no way that 95% of customers will ever consider running their Domino environment on AIX).
However, you have surpassed yourself with this post. In some areas of the world (principally mainland Europe) Symbian is indeed strong, but I would question how many of these phones are truly used as Smartphones - i.e. for email, calendaring and web. I know that many of my peers have had S60 Symbian phones and never used them for anything beyond normal phone use and the odd game. This differs wildly from the usual Blackberry & WinMobile usage patterns. Are Lotus right in just supporting WinMobile? I would say not, but should Symbian have been first - I'm not sure that would have been right either...
NSFDB2 on 64bit? 64bit Windows versions of Domino will probably account for max 10% of all installs. NSFDB2 probably less than 2-3% of all installs. Therefore, users using both account for a tiny number of customers... I am sure that it will be supported at some time in the future, but for now it isn't. Sad but true. Just use 32-bit.
Finally on Linux. Mika, you know that the reason for Expeditor/Eclipse is partly to support multi-platforms? And the reason why the C-based client was never ported was because it was too much work to do so? Well then why would IBM invest resources in porting a deprecated version of the Notes client onto the Linux platform? It makes no sense whatsoever...
Sorry to be blunt, but I think you need to live in the real world sometimes!
|
|
|
| | Mika
Friday, 22 February 2008 09:45:06 EET |
| | Wrapping it up from your last line: "I think you need to live in the real world sometimes!"
I think I am living in a more real world than the majority. I don't think people even realize that they just follow orders, lessons, rules, commandments. I'm not like that! I want to know how everything works, who's who, what is the optimal solution, etc...
Today I read an article that Sun T5220 UltraSPARC T2 beats an IBM System p 570 by far on a Oracle application with 10000 users. That made me immediately research more on that Sun machine, and I found out so far, it is indeed way faster on multi-threaded applications than a System p570 (with corresponding hardware specs of course).
I don't know yet how Domino behaves on a p570 vs T5220, but today I requested an additional resource from a company where I will soon perform all tests I need to know about. The decision is about Intel/Sun/PPC.
I know that Eclipse is supposed to make the programming cost of programming lower, at the cost of performance. IBM takes the easy way and makes everything Java based, but customers are not easily fooled, and they realize Java is a resource hog, using more CPU load. and performing much slower than a real C program. Except on a Sun, where Java beats everything, but Sun is a very special system, like I said it's a multi-threading system.
To customers it doesn't matter how expensive, how difficult, or how long it took to make a program, all they see and experience is the performance and resource consumption of the program they bought.
Even today, I won't touch Notes Standard even with a long stick, since Notes Basic is so much faster and better. I'm just missing a native Linux port of it. If the C code of Notes Basic would have been done right, it would compile without changes on any platform. As I have said many times before, you can write cross-platform code in C, if you just keep it simple. OpenGL/GLUT/SDL takes care of graphics interfaces, and the rest is trivial.
|
|
|
| | Henning
Saturday, 23 February 2008 18:11:37 EET |
| | I do not want to argue if you are right or wrong but whatever you are going to say here, IBM is not probably not going to change its strategy. Eclipse, or what IBM made out of Eclipse (called RCP) is going to be the fat foundation of everything that Lotus is going to develop for the foreseeable future (if its not web based). While I think the classic client will be around for a long time it will not move forward and so is a dead end. If your strategy is to wait for IBM to "make up their mind" then think again. It is not going to happen.
|
|
|
| | Mika
Monday, 25 February 2008 19:52:31 EET |
| | It's more work to recreate all clients for Eclipse than just taking the C++ source code of the Basic Clients and recompiling them under Linux and AIX. They should compile with only minor changes (adding #ifdefs), if it was programmed with cross-platform in mind...
|
|
|