Googling Foundations

Bob Baehr has blogged about the possibility that Foundations might follow OS/2 and the PS/2 to the graveyard through a lack of marketing effort by IBM. Bob certainly has a valid point about the need to get the word out to the marketplace. November 12th is coming up real quick and already I see Microsoft getting on the front foot. I keep a number of Google alerts active to stay in touch with what's happening. Here's a summary of one day's Google alerts from last week for "lotus foundations"‏ and "Essential Business Server"‏:

Hits for Lotus Foundations..1 hit
Hits for Microsoft EBS........7 hits

These results are about par for the course. The only Foundations posts Google ever seems to collect are generated by Lotus bloggers and our work is completely self-funded and self-motivated (as it should be). So where is the Lotus contribution to the marketing effort? I'm not talking about spending billions of marketing dollars here - I'm looking at which companies are 'Working the Web' with Press releases etc. in the most effective manner and right now the answer is Microsoft.

I know Lotus have a marketing plan and I understand that "it's 90% complete" and that "it's going through legal approval at IBM". Better late than never I suppose. We consultants might get frustrated with IBM at times but I'm sure its a thousand times worse for IBM employees who are itching to start the marketing engines but have to wait for IBM legal to finish their mocha latte and tick the appropriate boxes on the release forms.

Lotus has the opportunity over the next few months to prove Bob's fears were unfounded, and I'm sure the Pittsburgh Poster boy would quite happily eat a large helping of Yellow Humble Pie if that happened.
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