The Blogger Q&A with the Lotus Executives was an interesting time this year .. as always. Someone always asks a question that makes the rest of the room talk about the weather ... :-)

I asked how IBM Lotus was going compete with Sharepoint in 2009. Quickr and Connections are good products that will become great products in 2009. The problem is that they are not the platform or message that is Sharepoint. Sharepoint is something you can install in 30 minutes. It is a platform you can build your website on, use as a document store, make your content management system, run all of your workflow, and integrate with every server product on the Microsoft platform. There are thousands of web parts from partners available and web parts and lists are becoming defacto tools that END USERS can use. This is the beast Lotus has to go up against and win.

Lotus - the technical aspect of your products have never been your problem. Your development story is great. You need to get the platform story, the partner story, and the marketing story aligned and go head on with Sharepoint. You need to make portlets easy to make, distribute, sell, and incorporate in Quickr and Connections. You need to add a good content management piece and get workflow apps back on the Domino platform, using XPages, where they really started 15 years ago. You have all the tools, you just need to act.

I am hopeful that we will not need to have the same discussion next year.