You've got mail...twice. I’m off to see a customer tomorrow, not unusual you might think it’s my job, but relevant as I’ve been invited to talk to them about replacing their Notes email infrastructure with Exchange. As an ex Lotus employee and someone who’s still a fan of Notes the conversation will undoubtedly turn to my opinion of IBM’s messaging and collaboration strategy and what it means for Notes/Domino. Now if truth be told I shouldn’t even be having this conversation, but as this organisation is being told two things by IBM they’ve asked for a second, or should that be third opinion. One bit of IBM wants them to migrate to the latest version of Lotus Notes and another wants them to migrate to Lotus Workplace; but as they can’t understand why IBM has two different messaging platforms and no one at IBM can explain either I’ll have to give my unbiased thoughts. Oh and they don’t understand why there’s two versions of Sametime either. History shows that if a software company sells two products that do the same thing it has to at some point get off the fence and back one. It’s odd as it doesn’t seem to matter with other products, BMW for example can make the X3 and the X5 and people don’t seem to worry. However after five minutes in the software industry you discover that the rules everyone else plays by don’t apply. If you’re looking at your screen with a blank expression have a read of Merrill R Chapman’s book ‘In Search of Stupidly’ and you’ll understand. You might get a way with dual strategy with a more esoteric or niche product but when it comes to things like email one has to win. Place your bets….