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Isn't this old news? I thought that the Lotes Notes client was available for Linux for ages?

Anyway, Novell has had its groupwise client available in Java for some time now. Running on linux was flawless, and not at all limited to Novell's SuSe (I've got it running here on Debian). And if you don't like Java, there's an excellent web-based client.

No, it appears to be software that's multi-platform collected into one big corporate-friendly package.

So in the same way that dual-booters have been using Firefox and Opera on both OSes for years, IBM is making it easy for corporations to do the same.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I mean, look at all of the indications that we see from the company today. It is obvious that Microsoft realizes that Windows isn't always going to be a big cash cow. They have expanded their business so much over the past few years to add the Xbox, ramping up the search engine, expanding tools included in Office as well as adding new applications to their arsenal. I mean, how often do you see a Windows commercial anymore? You don't ... you see commercials about their other products. The problem for Microsoft is that people usually upgrade to the new version of Windows when they buy a new computer. There are still people running 98 (and possibly even 95)! Much to my dismay (I'm a Linux guy), Vista will gain dominance in the marketplace eventually. However, people do not upgrade their computers as often anymore just because hardware is not improving at such a fast pace as before. I guess we'll just have to wait to see what the future holds.

http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/ product4.nsf/wdocs/linux [ibm.com]

You're speaking as a home user or small business. IBM has made billions in consulting, much of it helping large companies use Linux. IBM has done a lot to support Linux, both directly (installations, code contributions) and indirectly (e.g. porting applications).

at one time they said they were going to switch a substantial portion of their worldwide desktops over to it, which they never did.

Last time I checked most employees were simply given the option, and could choose to switch to Linux if it didn't hurt their productivity (long term). Many made the switch. It's not easy getting 300,000+ people to switch without hurting productivity. They're slowing doing it.

I double-checked your post for any sarcasm or tinfoilhat tags. Frighteningly enough, I didn't see any.

MS has NOT been doing it properly since '95, and XP is no better. I remember the disastrous "Plug 'n' Play" we had force-fed to us; is it any wonder it was quickly renamed "Plug 'n' Pray"? Even worse, many times when at the Windows Update site it'd guess at the wrong drivers to update/install.... We lost a 2k server for a half-day due to just that. MS thought it had a 3Com NIC. It didn't.
Rather than go off on a long rant, I'll just describe the WinXP Pro and Ubuntu 6.10 installs on the very box I'm using.

• XP Pro

Run Install
Find driver for mobo
Find driver for video card
Find driver for NIC
Find driver/app for TV card
Find driver for Audigy.
Find driver for modem.
All hardware recognized; start work FINALLY!
vs:

• Ubuntu

Run install
Install Nvidia drivers
All hardware recognized; start work quickly!

Better hardware detection, my tail-side.

Details [ibm.com] from the Horse's Mouth [ibm.com] (so to speak).

It used to be a running joke whenever anyone would predict that Apple would go out of business in the next 6/12/18/etc months. It was predicted so many times that it became a gag.

Funny thing is that such predictions are made about Microsoft daily at /. without even the hint of irony.

I'm not staking a claim on either side of the debate, but the whole "X will be a MSFT Killer" is a huge /. cliche.

They're planning on calling it "Java"

This is more insightful than funny; I wish I had mod points.

IBM already makes cross-platform IT management products (or rather frequently, it buys them and incorporates them into their own high-priced products). The overall term for the many products in this family is IBM Tivoli [ibm.com]. Interestingly, much of it runs on Java. It's a very mature line of products used by lots of high-profile companies worldwide, and it makes IBM many millions of dollars.

The Virtual Places protocol used in Sametime was developed by the same people who wrote AOL's initial IM client. The company was named Ubique, and were later bought by IBM/Lotus (there's more history than that, but I'm not going to go into it here). I do not believe that the protocols themselves are identical, as I distinctly recall attempting to connect via TOC to a Sametime server and having it not work at all. Having said that, while I am intimately familiar with the Virtual Places protocol, I have acquainted myself with neither the older TOC protocol, nor the newer Oscar.

One thing Sametime is doing (or can be configured to do on a per-deployment basis) is providing a gateway to other servers/services via either XMPP or SIP. This works in much the same way that it previously allowed two separate Sametime deployments to interconnect previously. But this is actually part of the server infrastructure, and doesn't change the protocol that is spoken between a Sametime Connect client and the Sametime server.

As to why I care at all, I wrote the Meanwhile library, which is used by Gaim and Adium and Kopete and Miranda to provide Sametime connectivity.

DISCLAIMER: the history of Ubique and AOL, Lotus, and IBM is all stuff I dredged from the Internet, and may not necessarily be correct. I'm fairly sure it is, but I wasn't there, and I haven't directly spoken to anyone involved in any of the mergers

...Comes courtesy of John Naughton's column [guardian.co.uk] about Google Docs: "The problem is that the platform has been reduced in status to a life-support system for a web browser."

They have a new Lotus Notes interface. It's based on Eclipse. It's actually... well, umm, it's tractable, at least. Try some screenshots [wikipedia.org] and some newer screenshots [wikipedia.org].

People also forget that Notes isn't really an email program. It's a distributed database access and replication suite, and email just happens to be the one sort of database that it's used for most.