Yellow Collaborates

More I look at Sharepoint, more it seems to me that its trying to imitate Lotus Notes albeit within the Microsoft Space. There is no comparison to Lotus Notes and my belief was strengthened when a client who was addressing us in one of our forums (circa 2005) said about the implementation of the Lotus Workplace: “Your new product does not have any competition to live up to, in the sense of an external competitor; but rather look inwards and give us the best of Lotus Notes”.

For Sharepoint is strictly within the MS domain and the hold they have on the market with Windows and MS-Office along with many ex-Blue associates might help them pull it off. But theirs is a different problem. If Lotus Notes had a tough time warding off the wannabe geeks in the backoffice (yeah..so easy that a caveman could do it, as Geico advertises), Sharepoint does not seem to have that flexibility. We have seen some really eager beavers in the business side trying for exceptions to have LN Designer installed and start shooting applications from the hip. Can Sharepoint help them? Ok, so Lotus Notes causes a governance issue. Well, thats a policy and policing area, and do not mix it with ease of development.

But with each version and release of Microsoft apps thirsting for more and more resources on the machines, would we get to  a tipping point? I read in AZ republic that a manufacturer in Europe introduced MS-free laptops. No, it was not Apple/Mac but Linux based. Can business desktops be far away? A shift has been made and I hope that it will work its way through for the better.

A popular technical journalist has even started a campaign to Save XP and resist the migration to Vista. Yes, I agree..Vista sucks. I got my wife a Compaq base model and it was crying hoarse with the 512 RAM it came with. What was Compaq thinking when they sold it to me? I had to rush to Circuit City and install a 1GIG to get a decent work done. (Unfortunately, the memory does not expand beyond 1 GIG). Still my wife curses it and pesters me for a Thinkpad (hopefully XP). Well, I am more inclined to the AirBook!

I have MS-Office installed on my machine, but apart for my clients tasks I do not use MS-Office at all. Very rarely do I need a word editor. Most of it is done on email or Rich text editors in the browser. Or I have Lotus Symphony, which gives me functions for 99% of my current needs. And with most offices having Browser based or Mainframe applications if they just switched MS-Office out, the need for Windows goes away (thanks to Firefox) and things can tip over.

Many corporates are not yet ready for Vista, unless they upgrade the entire hardware. And with Linux based OS I guess they can save big time on infrastructure too!

For now let me get ahead and sign up on SAVE XP! Yeah, I can’t switch over just easily. My wife’s employer tells her that she needs IE to run the software that she uses for her work!