I only ask because it seems that nobody sees them anymore. Sure, we had the Notes 7 launch, which was fun, but aside from that, it seems that some strange paranormal event has happened to remove them all from the face of the earth. I can think back some 8 or 9 years ago, when I worked at a major Lotus customer**, that barely 3 months would go by without a friendly visit from our Lotus rep to see how things were going - did we know about the latest, greatest thing?, any problems we were having trouble solving? etc etc.

Now, I don't believe Notes is dead, so don't flame me for this, but it still seems the message isn't getting out there. Of the last 4 (large) companies I have worked for - 1 has completely moved away from Notes, 1 is moving away from Notes for mail only, and a third is fighting a battle to stop a large portion of Notes & Java (Websphere) development moving to .NET. I was handling this ok, until over the last two days I have heard of 2 more - one is a highly visible, very long-term, large scale Notes company which is moving to Outlook/Exchange, the other company is starting to contemplate moving to Outlook/Exchange rather than migrating their 2000 users from 4.6 to 6. Talking to people I know on the inside, it seems that almost every migration decision was completely political rather than technical.

My main problem (aside from a shrinking employment market!) is that in no company does it appear that IBM even knew these discussions were happening, and no attempt seems to have been made to prevent these customer losses. I honestly think that some of them may have been prevented with some agressive input from IBM to counter the continual pressure coming from Microsoft. I believe the problem is that the people who know (technically) are very rarely anywhere near high enough in the organisations to prevent these decisions being made. Existing customers need just as much (if not more) attention than new or potential customers. Surely it would help if IBM Lotus would start sticking their heads back in the corporate doors and asking "How are things going here?" - they just might be surprised at the response.

** corporate names have been removed to protect... well me!