Starting with Lotusphere (you know what I mean) this year I noticed stronger movement inside our yellow bubble.
It seems lot of the people that are active in presenting and blogging are already partly “investing” in other technologies than Domino/Notes. And it is only logical. Despite the fact that XPages team guys are extremely helpful and open (we’re talking IBM here!) I’d say number of problems and drawbacks is a bit too high. Beginning with security problems (POODLE, Java, …), last FixPacks for Notes/Domino had been not tested as they should had been, through outdated Eclipse under DDE to not offering standard set of tools (integrated test framework, decent version of Java, …). *
And all these (and each of you probably can add one or two problems to this list) smaller or bigger drawbacks lead to inevitable conclusion: We can no longer treat Domino as a development platform of choice. World is moving forward so fast. Domino is not. Unfortunately.
Everything now happens in browser and on mobile devices. Even IBM knows that. From a developer perspective they want me to go Bluemix way. I can do that. I was using similar platforms long enough to know it works. Again: from my perspective. But as a consultant, I should evaluate all those similar offerings. Is it really the best one? Does it have better support? Higher uptime? Does it offer more memory and cpu power? Does it offer competitive price?
Not sure the answer to all these question is “Yes”. And Bluemix certainly is new. Domino support there is still at almost “hello world” level.
Business-wise I have no idea how to convince my customers who use Domino to go Bluemix way.
* Not mentioning “exceptional” marketing support for Notes/Domino…and for User Groups.