Read through the report

Finally got the hotly debated white paper to download.

I haven't gotten through reading everyone's comments yet, so hopefully I am not duplicating what has been said.

Just some quick observations/ramblings.

Stripping extraneous functionality and making them available in another product, that would most likely have to be purchased or require some kind of extra licensing. Hmm, then the pricing for Exchange would certainly drop, right?

If they are saying hey, if you just want e-mail then e-mail is what you can get. Isn't that basically along the lines of Notes Domino Express. A line of products not even touched upon in the report.

I must have read it to fast, I think I missed the picture depicting the MS path for the future.

When it doesn't appear that Microsoft really plans to be releasing any new versions, then I can see where extending the support would almost be a requirement, not a plus.

I would be curious to see the U.S. market projections alone. Between 2000 and 2008 they show corporate mailboxes close to doubling. Simply from a personal perspective, no data to base it on, I don't think the growth will be that great in the U.S. as e-mail within the corporate environment appears to be pretty saturated and I would not expect a big population explosion within the corporate world.

Microsoft up by 2% in market share and Lotus/IBM down by 7% in market share. I would be interested to see where the other 5% (34 million mailboxes) that Lotus/IBM is projected to lose will go.

I find it interesting that the report mentions the clients of both Domino/Notes and Workplace, but fails to mention Outlook.

It seems the press use to say there was no strategy for the future of Notes/Domino and ever since info has come out on ND7 and ND8 they make it into a bad thing and MS dropping their next planned upgrade and only having patches seems to be put in a good light.

Not sure what significant strain the new releases will put on IT budgets. I know I am entitled to receive all of the updates/upgrades via maintenance for our Notes/Domino environment. Maybe this is in regards to manpower on installations, which I would not expect to be any more of a strain than MS patches.

Customer centric???

MS focusing on security, reliability, and scalability. Can't hold it against Notes/Domino for already having those.

As things stand today, I can't say that I totally disagree that MS numbers will be up and Lotus/IBM numbers will be down, as it is still management that makes the decisions.

As many have Outlook of one flavor or another at home they tend to feel comfort in seeing the same thing at work. I think Hotmail is a plus for MS as well.

Whatever the path ends up being in the IBM/Lotus arena, I hope it doesn't leave a bad taste as the end of the line for cc:Mail did for some.