IBM takes on Google and Microsoft with a cloud based service called IBM Docs

I concur. Having been forced to use the Lotus email client during my life at IBM, the name 'Lotus' does not conjure up pleasant memories.

Yup, that's a black mark for sure.

IBM's stock would rocket if they re-branded or killed of Lotus, it's over taken Real Player for my most despised brand of software.

IBM is in the process of removing the Lotus brand from everything. This 'Greenhouse' is a test bed for the "Lotus" community and hasn't gone through the rebranding yet.

I'm sure that when they release this properly it won't have the dreaded L-word anywhere near it.

This has been a long-running saga within the IBM/Lotus community for years now. It's obviously a toxic brand, but it's taken them a while to start clearing it out. I think they're still working out how to brand the next version of Lotus Notes.

(Yes, Lotus Notes is still widely used. Reluctant Notes/Domino admin here).

random memory - one of my earlier jobs in my career was working with lotus notes to develop custom mods of some notes-based package we were reselling. On Windows 95. With 16megs of memory. I think I finagled a 32meg system eventually for some testing/dev, but everything then had to be vetted on the 16meg systems we were shipping out. What an insanely slow nightmare to work with that was.

From all accounts, Notes had/has some interesting ideas re: doc management, but I could never see past the slowness to appreciate what, if anything, Notes was ever really good at.

Except in the latter case they would have their small niche of very loyal customers.

When I see the hatred people have for anything "Lotus" I'm both surprised and not surprised. Surprised because I didn't know so many people used a "Lotus" product like Notes. Then not surprised since I've used them and constantly curse at them.

Even with this post I read the title and had a bit of hope for IBM, then saw the link to lotus.com and stopped to debate if I should even click on it.

>It's literally like branding your new product with swastikas.

Targeting a niche market ?

Looking at the screen shot it looks a lot like EverNote. I think the screen is designed to be clean,if not a tad boring. But there is nothing wrong with that.

I think you're right, but at the same time, Google or even Microsoft are in no position to do the reverse -- compete with IBM in the corporate world where big customers run their own clouds and define a lot of the rules and bureaucratic processes.

Google's paid cloud app stuff didn't even have urgent telephone support until recently, and there's still not (and not going to be, I think) any way to get your google rep to explain stuff to you over the course of a few months (and fancy dinners out), before finally tailoring you a customized (and pricy) contract.

Microsoft, I think, knows how to do those things much better than Google, but are instead hampered by the relatively pukey quality of their cloudy offerings so far -- they're playing catch up, years behind Google, and internally conflicted by the still-huge revenues of their legacy cash cows.

I'm not saying IBM can win in this market, just saying that Google Docs, Dropbox, Evernote, and all these cloudtastic superheroes of the consumer market have yet to achieve significance in the weird altiverse of Big Corporate.

I completely disagree about competing with Google and Microsoft.

Google's weakness in the enterprise productivity software market segment is that they have no track record of providing stability via long term backward compatibility and support for obsolescent software - e.g. the Chrome Browser. Furthermore, the enterprise market is not a significant piece of the core strategy - it just doesn't grow fast enough and it requires the dedication of a highly trained salesforce and a commitment to long term support of each software release.

IBM can compete with Microsoft on the same basis as they have for the past twenty years - as an ecosystem.

I think IBM could be a great addition to this market. It seems like they're due to get serious about some sort of product again and some sort of service application suite seems right up their alley.

Now it's a for profit venture out of the gate, no free use for ad impressions or anything like that, but I could see them bringing some novel concepts to the table. That's assuming they are serious about it. Integration with other enterprise apps and enterprise cloud apps, in a single app suite with the best uptime and reliability around. It's not super sexy but I could see a market for it if they're serious.

This is part of a wider collaboration strategy from IBM.

As well as Notes, they have a "Connections" platform which is a combination of document sharing, facebook-style profiles and a few other things for internal corporate intranets. From the demos I've seen it's relatively nice, as enterprise software goes. From last month's "Lotusphere" conference it sounds like they're adding document editing to this, and aiming to move everything (including email) to an integrate web-based system. I think they're selling it as either onsite or hosted.

Edit: Sorry for how corporate that sounds. I guess that's just how my mind goes when I start thinking about IBM software!

Symphony was based on an old OpenOffice code base and is now dead. IBM is joining the Apache OpenOffice project and will be releasing their own IBM branded OpenOffice in the future.

http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-symph...

Ha ha ... Me too.

I found a page where I could create an account but that account does not work on the login for the docs-page.

If they can't even do a user friendly login, how can they make a good document editor?

It's easy. You simply call IBM to get a quote (http://bit.ly/Ac0zjF), put together a budget proposal, wait for the next fiscal year for budget approval, draw up a purchase order, schedule your training, and you'll be up and running in 12-18 months tops.

By sending Word/Excel/etc documents around in email, turning on revisions, and having endless discussions on which version is current.

We still do that now.