Can IBM save Lotus from the Microsoft onslaught?

Microsoft has IBM in its cross-hairs, aiming to kill Lotus Notes and replace it with SharePoint. But Microsoft will have a tough time, because IBM, rather than Microsoft, seems to have gotten religion when it comes to Web 2.0.

A little over a week ago, according to Network World, Microsoft did a bit of chest-beating, and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner crowed at the company's annual meeting for financial analysts, "Let’s talk about replacing Lotus Notes."

Turner boasted that "This past year we sold in 4.86 million seats of our collaboration solution – SharePoint, Exchange and Office – into IBM Lotus Notes accounts," and promised to do more of the same.

According to the article, IBM shot back that one-third of its SameTime customers were companies with Microsoft Exchange installed.

The question remains, though, can Microsoft do it? Notes is the application that IT staff loves, but everyone else seems to hate. I spent several unpleasant years being forced to use Notes. The applications that the IT staff built for it were approximately worthless. And as for Notes as an email client, the less said, the better.

However, users don't get to vote for this kind of thing. And according to some people, at least, IBM has seen the Web 2.0 light. This June, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, for example, there was a SharePoint versus Lotus Connections shootout, and Lotus came out the victor, because of its better use of social networking.

Mike Gotta, Burton Group analyst who moderated the session, said that Connections was "the clear winner across the board," according to Network World.

In his blog, Gotta castigated Microsoft on several accounts. He seemed to hint that Microsoft arrogance may be at work:

Maybe Microsoft underestimated IBM. Maybe Microsoft feels that SharePoint is on such a roll that its weak blog and wiki offerings are not going to hurt it in the long run. I'm at a loss as to why the session was such a bust from a Microsoft perspective. There was clearly more that could have been shown but for whatever reason, IBM walked out of the room with a clear and decisive win.

If Microsoft is serious about unseating Lotus, it's going to have to do more than boast. It's going to have to beef up SharePoint's social networking capabilities, for a start. And chest-beating won't help sell a single copy of software.