The writing was on the wall and now its official. Lotus Foundations is dead. I don’t think that there will be any migration path to anything else.
What annoys me most, is the fact, that IBM again bought a perfectly good product and killed it. Two years. Twice they changed directions in marketing and distribution. Every time we had to change our strategy, too. We did it, because we believed in the product and IBM.
Dear IBM, you made us loose money. It wasn’t the product, that was perfectly good. It was your incompetence in bringing it to the market. We even gave you money for co- marketing, which was completely useless, because you don’t know how to approach SMBs.
You didn’t even had the guts to schedule a partner call, to give us the bad news.
You want us as Business PARTNERS. A partnership builds on mutual respect.
You know, that I was one of the most active supporters of Lotus Foundations. I always defended you. You just have to read my contributions in LinkedIn.
I am sad. I feel betrayed.
I am not mad at the Lotus Foundations Team. I had the honor to meet and talk to quite a few of you. It was always a pleasure to work with all of you.
PS: If anybody comes up with „that is only about Passport Advantage“, forget it. Outside North America there is no other distribution channel. For us, that is the end, except IBM comes up with something else.
Since I posted the „that is only about Passport Advantage,“ I thought that every partner, worldwide, had two channels to get the software; Passport and direct from the IBM Foundations channel. It seems I was wrong. Thanks to you, I now „get“ the seriousness of the withdrawal from Passport Advantage.
Happily we didn’t loose money but I’m not sure what our customers will say if they hear the news. At least two of them bought a LFS some weeks ago. It’s the perfect solution for them but was last’s in the end?
At the end there is one big well known huge company which is unable to partner with their partners and is also unable to sell a good product. And in case of my customers their will last a bad taste and a small company which will stay to help the customer until the one with the big name switched off all the lights.
When IBM brought Net Integration I thought they finally made a step forward in the right direction. But as I was talking the former Net Integration staff and all the crappy restrictions that they have placed on it, it sounded like the same old same old was happening. I was hoping that things would have finally changed, but my gut feeling was that SMB is not in IBM’s DNA and they will never understand the potential of this market. I suspect the politics between the different operations of IBM had a big impact. If Microsoft and many other companies can make money in this market, then it is a viable market. But IBM just does not seem to get it. As a business partner, it has been costly and frustrating for us to deal with IBM. IBM please do business partners a favor and open source Lotus Foundations so that business partners can market it ourselves since you really do not seem to what to continue this product. Domino can be provided as an add-on which business partners can resell and provide services.