False Positives: Lotus Notes is alive and well, just very quiet

Globe and Mail Tech columnist Jack Kapica notes (May 25 2005. no perm links Jack?) :

Lotus Notes is alive and well: A press release arrived here the other day extolling how three companies fiddled with their e-mail systems and created a full-blown collaboration system involving the organization of a huge amount of content.

The release was sent from IBM, and the software they were using was Lotus Notes and Domino. "Within 48 hours," intoned the text about one of the companies, "they developed a prototype to serve as the basis of five working, lawyer-friendly databases. In the end, they built a sophisticated knowledge management system that quickly enabled them to save time and money, and better serve [their] clients."

I confess to being startled by this, if only because I don't usually stumble on implementations of Lotus Notes during my usual rounds. Okay, let's be blunt: I haven't seen Lotus Notes outside of an IBM office. In fact, the last time I saw it was when I installed an evaluation copy on my home machine a couple of years ago, but not being part of a corporate network I didn't have anyone I could collaborate with.

I have no doubt Lotus Notes and Domino are fine products, but their names come up very rarely in news stories, reviews or other material outside of IBM's PR machinery.

If it's true, as IBM claims, that Lotus Notes has a global user base of 118 million users, then it must be a powerful force in the workplace.

I just wonder why nobody seems to talk about them very much.

I forwarded this to Ed Brill and the Note's Community is starting to comment. Could it be because "It Just Works!"? No security leaks, No ripe and replace, No dinner with Bill. Why isn't the G&M writing about it?