ReinventMobile recently released a study of user preferences regarding their mobile PC. The study analyzed close to 4,000 conversations about mobile PC’s across the web to extract user likes and dislikes about current mobile PC’s.

Most of the findings (below) are mere statistical validation for common sense. Things like wishing they could revert from Vista to XP, faster end-solution (leaner software or faster hardware, users didn’t care),  and longer battery life.

The surprise was how strongly users felt on a few particular issues–they abhorred long boot times, hated trialware (prefer to just pay up front), and wished wi-fi issues would disappear.

Main findings:

• Boot-up time is wasted time that lasts too long and reduces productivity
• Too many unnecessary software add-ons are slowing down mobile PCs
• The tribulations of too many trial software offers and applications is an issue
• Heat build-up and noise during continuous operation annoys users
• Power management and batteries need a boost to buy more operating time
• Trying to connect is often a disconnect, particularly in the wireless world
• Weight weighs heavily on their decision about what system to buy
• Poor ergonomics and badly designed input devices are a strain
• Insufficient RAM, weak graphics, faulty motherboards are big areas of complaint

Full study available here.

Capping a comeback from a demotion in the wake of Hailstorm’s failure to survive a privacy challenge led by bloggers, Server and Tools senior VP Bob Muglia was promoted to President of the Microsoft group. Muglia now commands a Microsoft unit with some 22% of the company’s $60 billion in revenue.

Significantly, Muglia’s ascension puts him in a Gang of Four with Entertainment chief Robbie Bach, Office Business czar Stephen Elop, and Online Services Group newcomer Qi Lu. Windows and Windows Live round out the major divisions, but is led by a trio of senior VPs the most notable of which is former Office czar Steven Sinofsky. With Muglia now controlling Windows Azure, Live Mesh, and Silverlight, he sits atop the new Microsoft Web OS architecture from an operational perspective.

As a major player with power in both cloud and on-premise constituencies, Muglia has proven adept at surviving and prospering while the company goes through a disruptive and potentially damaging transformation. Steve Ballmer’s decision to solidify Muglia’s status after moving Muglia from a report headcount of 3,000 to 1 in 2001 also provides Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie with a powerful ally. Muglia’s strategic assets (significant revenue and the ability to survive in the nation state politics of Redmond’s Windows and Office groups) are complementary to Ozzie’s command of the direction the company must take to avoid being marginalized by Google and its disruptive advertising model.

Note: Live Mesh is a finalist for the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement award at The Crunchies this Friday, January 9th in San Francisco.

In preparation for the Crunchies this Friday, January 9, I’ve been asked to write 5 short summaries to cover the nominees for Best Enterprise. There are 3 cloud computing entrants - Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and Force.com - and 2 from the worlds of Twitter clone (Yammer) and Office is Dead (Zoho.) My personal cloud favorite, Live Mesh, did not make the cut, but it’s a finalist in the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement category.

Mike Arrington included both Yammer and Zoho in his 2009 Products He Can’t Live Without, so I’ll let him do those honors:

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

and

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but it’s free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

In the cloud department, Amazon Web Services has finally drawn Windows Azure into the game, with Google App Engine the sandbox for what I consider to be the heart of Google’s cloud strategy: Gmail Labs. AWS and its secret weapon the Kindle represent the major competitor to Apple’s iPhone/MacBook Air/Time Machine trifecta, and we’ll soon see the two microsystems lap the field as media and micromessaging merge.

Gmail Labs will expand and merge into Chrome as the browser goes cross platform, adding rich media video and realtime features as Gears modules, and in the process set up a showdown with Azure/Mesh and Silverlight Office. Meanwhile, Force.com will continue to partner with Google while using Adobe Flash as a hedge against Silverlight. Salesforce will in effect become the FriendFeed of the Enterprise, aggregating social media services through a steady rollout of API connectors.

And the winner is….

There’s going to be a moment in the near future where FriendFeed needs to deliver realtime search over IM. In a response to Robert Scoble yesterday, Paul Buchheit indicated track or something like it would be high on the list of things to commit to in the next round of improvements to the system. After a series of realtime services and API extensions late last year, FriendFeed has slowed its feature release pattern in favor of incremental improvements to its user interface.

The reasons for a realtime search mechanism can be debated, but what will be unavoidable is the implications of not moving forward for both FriendFeed and Twitter. The market for micromessaging may appear to be growing, what with major media outlets signing on and blogger firestorms about the value to individual brands dominating the holiday slowdown of so-called “real” news. But in fact, the Twitter bandwagon has propped up only the least significant part of the micromessaging wave.

The tip of the iceberg, Twitter’s marketing power or FriendFeed’s “conversation”, has not yet reached the kind of ubiquity micromessengers expect and not so secretly count on. The ROI on managing a Twitter Follow community produces reasonable economies of scale for only a very few. The Scobles must maintain their clouds regardless of the effort expended, while the up and comers are getting squeezed on FriendFeed by noisier folks willing to marginalize the threads with noise. People like Tim O’Reilly apparently avoid the comments and likes, and as a result the domain itself.

The disconnect and inequity of the current environment is substantially due to the lack of Track, which smooths out the signal to noise cycle by providing a realtime actionable opportunity that can be mined after the fact as “content.” Filtering built on top of Track will help tamp down spam and bot strategies, and it will also produce a set of favored filters that will both curate the flow and keep it open to new talent.

The small window of time when Track first emerged was not enough to evangelize its powers to the general audience, and obfuscation by vendors and entrenched interests kept the lid on for the second half of the year. But FriendFeed’s investments in realtime took the baton from Evan Prodromou and the open source Laconica project and made it clear that at least three business models are orbiting the realtime micromessaging opportunity.

In historical terms, we’re seeing a battle for control of the core realtime ping server. How long this post will take to reach RSS will illustrate how the major platform vendor in RSS is handling its responsibility as the major player. With its purchase of FeedBurner and recent rolloever of FeedBurner URLs to its own domain, Google has experienced some significant latency in syncing new posts to its dominant RSS feeds. This post, when published via WordPress, is made available to Feedburner within seconds. Yet most posts I’ve published in the last several weeks have averaged over two hours before they propagate to the RSS audience of Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter, and beyond.

TechCrunch engineers have implemented an auto ping service to try and fix the problem, but Google’s stated policy is to provide replication within 30 minutes. Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.

Update: Finally hit RSS at 6:17PM.

On the Gillmor Gang yesterday, I ended the show with my pick for most important story of 2009, the release of Chrome for the Mac. Here’s why:

Chrome represents the leading edge of Google’s development platform for its version of the Web OS. Once Gears is embedded in a Mac client, Gmail Labs can start writing directly to the rich media store as it begins to build out across Google properties. This effectively levels the playing field with Mesh/Silverlight and takes a considerable chunk out out of Sun, Adobe, and Amazon Web Services at the developer level.

Having Google and Microsoft at a level platform above these other players also gives Apple considerable sway in maintaining a chokehold on the mobile device market. By enabling Gmail Labs services on the iPhone, Apple will provide AT&T and therefore the G1 carriers a revenue model for migrating carrier-controlled services to a new rich media paradigm over micromessaging and a rich media message bus.

The revenue will come from subsidized subscription affinity services, carried on top of the iPhone 3G Internet radio platform and streaming video news services. These affinitycasts will gain significant market share among realtime audiences, whose early signals will be highly predictive of the valuable swarming behavior so critical to surviving recessionary pressures. In a shrinking market, those nodes that raise targetable market share will skim the cream off the top before the commodity brokers can get to the suite spot in the market. It’s an interactive successor to the upfront market.

How Microsoft performs in this next period will tell the tale for the next major event in the technology marketplace. Those that look to a Yahoo absorption are really betting on what comes as a result of that move. Personally, I don’t think Yahoo as an entity matters one whit, but as a platform on which to roll out Silverlight Office, quite a bit. In many ways, Yahoo is like Lotus was pre-Y2K, when the email transition from DOS and Unix to Windows and Internet protocols was being waged between Microsoft, Netscape, and Lotus.

The most significant battle of that war was the integration of ccMail into Notes, which provided a rationale for Netscape to consolidate its suite of servers/acquisitions into a collaboration suite. In turn, Lotus pivoted to Interent protocols by layering an available IBM Web server on top of Notes to create Domino. Microsoft countered with the renegade Exchange team briefly wrestling Internet access to the file system away from the SQL Server team during an Internet Information Server option pack update to NT.

Though the coup was shortlived, when the SQL Server team regained control the resultant power shift in Redmond was consolidated under the rubric of .Net where it has remained to this day. The technologies underlying Outlook Web Access and its attendant APIs spawned client and server constituencies tha dominate today’s Web OS: AJAX on the client and ASP.Net on the server. Firefox ratified Ajax and the standards stub that reduced Internet Explorer to a subservient position in browser development, and Scott Guthrie rode ASP.Net to control of what is now the Silverlight platform.

These two power bases - controlled by Google and Microsoft - are being synchronized and ultimately merged into what from the developer perspective will be a single model. Chrome on the Mac gives a crucial audience - the new media - the tools it needs to deeply integrate the new technology base into the delivery systems of their content. The various cloud services can be rendered virtually identically across both Mesh/Silverlight and GLabs/Gears, and the differences will be largely a leapfrog update away from parity.

What’s more complex and difficult for the key audiences to absorb is the new landscape in which these players will operate. Those who persist in the notion of religious bragging rights - whether the new black of the “open stack” or whatever the old guard at Microsoft will exploit to try and FUD the new direction - will be driven out of contention. Those developers who architect their products to allow easy and automated switching between these and satellite platforms will survive and prosper when the inevitable threshold of enough money washed away produces economic stability for the hardy.

If the timing of the Chrome Mac client remains March, it will be coincident with Microsoft’s Mix ‘09 conference, where it would make sense for Silverlight to be optimized for Chrome and the MacBook Air crowd. If you use the old record business as an analogy, we’re looking at the moment in ‘66 when Rubber Soul and Revolver created the album market, which in turn allowed FM radio to replace Top 40 radio and overwhelm the media business. The creative drove the container, the massive redistribution of power that to most of us looked like the era of the singer/songwriter.

In 2008 Neil Young showed up onstage at JavaOne and DreamForce, talking about his decades-long Archives and green car projects respectively. 40-something years ago, Young wrote and recorded Ohio live with Crosby, Stills, and Nash - the track was on the radio and in the channel within 48 hours. Then it was Ahmet Ertegun and Warners, today it’s Benioff and Schwartz and Microsoft and Google.

Back then, I was one of those idiots who circled the Pentagon during the March on Washington. We all joined hands and chanted in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. Of course it didn’t work, but I have to admit it: for a brief few seconds I opened my eyes and looked around to see if it did. When Chrome for the Mac ships, I’ll do that again.

Yesterday, major websites across the US slowed to a crawl when Level 3 Communications, which operates one of the largest internet backbones in the world, experienced technical difficulties.

For knowledge workers, losing internet access is a big deal. (How much of your job would be impossible without internet?) But the internet not only enables our jobs, it also frees us to collaborate globally while working away from our desks and away from the normal 8-5 (should we choose).

The freedom of working from home means we are not forced to leave work. The very technology that’s freed us has become our lifeline. As a result, this fascinating survey shows we now feel guilty if we don’t work during the holidays.

Currently, I’m writing from a friend’s ranch house in the middle of North Dakota. In previous years, my cell phone wouldn’t work, nor would my EVDO modem, and dial-up speeds never topped 30Kbps. Coming here meant zero functional internet–a guilt-free vacation.

But this year my cell modem works. Tonight, I’m able to wrap up some last-minute work. And I’m also faced with a choice–do I unplug for three days as originally planned, or do I check e-mail tomorrow?

Research shows knowledge workers can’t afford to NOT spend time away from work exercising, sleeping, and de-stressing. Continuing to work simply results in feeling productive, rather than being productive.  Personally, I find my creativity withers, my energy tanks, and my planning horizons shrink.

But knowing and doing aren’t the same.
As a co-worker observed, “This is the season when everyone PRETENDS to not work.”

See you in four days.

We’re now in Week at least Two of the great drought of ‘09, where the blogosphere has woken up to the poverty of its attention algorithms and is frantically searching to harness the Gesture model as quantified by Twitter et al. Before I go much further, let me say that this problem has already been tackled and largely solved. But the fact that this hasn’t gotten much apparent traction suggests no one is really happy with a solution.

As I’ve said for perhaps 3 or 4 years, we are in the evolution from an attention model to a gesture model. Twitter represents the latest and greatest instantiation of gestures, where apparently unprovoked statements circulate aysnchronous (or asymetric) overlapping Follow clouds and provide a dynamic DVR control for Web content. Now that rich media platforms are emerging on top of this console (Gmail, Mesh, Flash) the battle has shifted from control to contract.

What people call filtering is the contouring of dynamic systems to reflect the aggregate gestures of affinity groups. Whether it’s the affinity group as modeled by a single individual (Techmeme) or the gestural cloud orbiting individual brands (TechCrunch, Scoble, O’Reilly, Feldman) or even the collective noise of Digg, Google, or Huffington, the power of affiliation continues to trump most every business model of the outgoing generation.

This is most dearly felt by those who pioneered this era, by those who see those leaders as Old and In the Way, by those who try and force this transition into Us versus Them, a generational shift that is incorrectly positioned around age. One of the virtues of age is the lessons of survival, and more specifically the calculation of how many heartbeats to parcel out over which concerns. Today’s noise is about the lack of signal, or the efficiency (or lack of it) of systems to harvest the signal.

Break down the arguments for a new Techmeme: no matter how you atomize it, you won’t find a better car than the one you like the best. W.C. Fields is still a funny guy. Lenny is still the master, Pryor the one who crossed over into the center of the human condition and forever erased the color “barrier.” Will a Techmeme killer come along? No. Techmeme will kill itself before that, because Gabe will move on to something he loves more. And I’ll probably move with him. I like Gabe.

The cry for more, better news is the urge for moving forward, for finding the next hill to climb, the space race, the perfect wave. Believing otherwise seems hopeless, pathetic, angry, unacceptable. Believing something is great does not imply nobody can do better. It does imply that if somebody can also do something great, that will be better because it’s something to add to the pile of great. It doesn’t detract from what’s great; it ratifies what’s great.

So here’s to the Drought of ‘09. Let’s rail against it, debate it, ignore it, shut off our computers, quit Twitter, auto-follow everybody, follow nobody, release track, never offer track ever again, argue about nothing, make lists of authoritative people, call each other stupid, be stupid professionally, get fired, quit while we’re behind, speak only with sarcasm, be completely honest, run for the OpenID board, declare RSS dead, link to everybody, link only to your friends, link never, only take left turns while driving.

In a drought, we conserve. Flush less frequently. Take showers instead of baths. If this is a drought, a lack of value, is that in and of itself valuable to know? If Techmeme says nothing’s happening, do we settle? Dave Winer says let’s block Techmeme so we know it’s not authoritative. I do that all the time, by writing something stupid or boring or incomprehensible. Let’s all write more crap; that way Techmeme will really suck and then we can get rid of it in favor of some other guy’s stupid algorithm. Alright. Here’s my ante. Who’s with me?

Looking back over the big stories of 2008, I’d have to go with the failed Microsoft/Yahoo acquisition as the least surprising and most interesting drama of the technology world. Coming as it did in the wake of Google’s rapid climb to the top, Yahoo’s failure to resonate and Microsoft’s to take advantage of the flattening of the Web 2.0 curve underscored the hard work ahead.

If it weren’t for the economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama, we might be tip-toeing into 2009 with very little underlying context for how to measure the importance of technology in our daily lives. As realtime media eats its parents and apparently destroys the economic constructs of the previous generation, few of our “thought leaders” seem willing to call the next winners. Instead, they settle for calling out the losers.

Newspapers are a common target. Certainly the handwriting is on the wall around the content, with current digital monetization returning a dime on the print dollar. So the conservative analysis goes: the 90 cents is gone, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West, not to return. The more liberal thinking is that the dime will grow, not fast enough to save the jobs but eventually because the value will find its audience.

Television seems more buttressed against complete collapse, but the banking implosion could foreshadow the speed of decline in broadcast media if some analog to incomprehensible derivatives lies waiting just below the surface. Imagining prime time becoming a shootout between Jay Leno, Comedy Central, and Keith Olbermann may not be too hard if the series cancellations accelerate past some threshold. If Heroes implodes, will Gray’s Anatomy be enough to stem the tide? Hollywood is having a tough time competing with reality these days.

The music business may be entering a climactic phase, as the social networks realize that’s where the real money is pooling. Facebook Connect is the third rail here; if users find out what their attention is really worth, some of these networks will be trampled in the rush for the doors. My money is still with Apple for now, but whoever controls the social graph as DVR will be in the driver seat.

Having just violated the Loser scenario if only a little, let’s handicap the next few months as they might play out. January 20th looms as the first inflection point, where the Republicans have to start playing regulation ball. Given the critical need for funding of the green and healthcare initiatives on the back of the Big Bailout of ‘09, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see some posturing from the right overwhelmed by the grace period of economic data taking some time to reflect the impact of the money injection.

In the absence of cable news drama of the usual kind, the focus may shift to the new media rally. Already we’re seeing the beginnings of the attack on Page Rank, the canonization of realtime media, and the roots of a new authority model. In essence, Web 2.0 has lost its brand momentum to the social vortex. Google continues to mine the growing extensions to Adsense, but user awareness of the value of their gestures is changing the nature of acceptable user contracts.

Scoble’s vision of mining the Twitter (FriendFeed) database of gestures is colliding with the notion of the free Web. Couched as a religious issue, the choice seems obvious: the volume of ambient signals outperforms the scoped cloud of qualified micro-communities. This is where the digital dime lives today - not enough to jump but enough to undermine a significant portion of the remaining tail of the dollar.

From the user’s perspective, the choice will soon morph from one of access to one of curated value. A choice of an unmanageable stream of free data or a controlled metered aggregation where the ROI is recorded and fed back into the stream as a constant reminder of its effectiveness and the user’s value to the system. Once the user understands the value of time spent in navigation (filtering) the economics of the system will tip.

Thus we have the race to deliver realtime activity streams with recursive social filtering. We know who the horses are: Facebook, Microsoft, Google/MySpace, FriendFeed/Twitter - and the drivers: Apple, Ebay/Skype, Amazon. Where they meet head on - VoIP over the iPhone, videoconferencing over 3G, Twittercredits redeemable at the popcorn line - is where micropayments meet microcommunities.

Extrapolating from this moment where user value creates economic clout, where does the power reside in funding the new media? On the surface, the incumbents remain in charge - the Oscars, the SuperBowl, the Stones tour, and so on. But how we pay for our entertainment shifts to some degree from the work we do to the way we share our impressions, expertise, insights, humor, and emotions. And even more valuable - what we’re bored by, cheated by, pandered to, and so on. The social capital that’s built by studios, companies, political figures, religious leaders is an ongoing reputational referendum - authority rank in the most dynamic and fluid of systems.

How soon we see this recovery depends on how difficult the transition is from paper dollar to digital dime. The digital dime may be worth more for its efficiency in reaching targeted markets than the anonymous dollar it is replacing. The social clouds we maintain and the affinities they reveal are powerful tools for getting the attention of companies and government, and extracting discounts, responsiveness, and even equity in future products. These shared dimes can add up to real money.

Next month is the annual Lotusphere conference. IBM is giving two free tickets to TC readers–leave a comment saying why you’d like to go to Lotusphere, and we’ll pick the winners by Monday morning. (Note: Passes cover conference registration only, not travel/hotel.)

Few pieces of software are as polarizing as Lotus Notes. When my last job forced me to use Notes, I found the interface clunky, the graphics Win 95′esqe, and the workflow architecture non-intuitive. Granted,  I was using Version 6.5 (Notes is now on Release 8), but even so I found it frustratingly unproductive. And I’m clearly not alone.

Probably the most famous Notes aficionado is David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. (The eProductivity application–built off the Notes platform–is David’s personal GTD tool.)

When I recently attended David’s GTD seminar, I was struck by the contrast between his fresh ideas, and the outdated nonsense of the Notes 6.5 interface. During this podcast, David directly asked, “Why do end users hate Lotus notes?” And then pointed out that most Notes users have no clue of the power of the tools they are using.

Which leaves me wondering–has IBM’s Lotus Notes lost touch with the user-centric web 2.0 world?

To answer these questions, I interviewed Kevin Cavanaugh, IBM’s VP in charge of the Notes/Domino group. Also joining us was Ed Brill, IBM’s Director of Messaging and Collaboration.
(My conclusions after the interview.)

Most people I talk with think Notes is dead or dying…

Notes has had seventeen straight quarters of growth. This year alone, we experienced 17% growth in Q1, 20% in Q2, and 10% in Q3. Over 60% of IBM business is overseas, and that’s mirrored in Lotus. Currently, out of the approximately 46,000 companies using the Notes/Domino platform, only 30% are US based.

What’s your target customer size?

Traditionally, IBM as a whole has focused on large enterprises. [The Notes group] average customer is a little smaller than the rest of IBM–we’re certainly more active in the small to medium business market.

Are you jumping on board the cloud bandwagon?

Generally, security concerns and the economics of cloud offerings aren’t as appealing to IBM, and larger enterprises. However, we recently released several cloud offerings for Lotus, including the Lotus Foundation, a remotely managed appliance targeting companies smaller than 250 people.

What’s up with the clunky UI?

Until R8, the UI was from 1995 era. We kept renovating under the hood, but not the UI. For R8, we significantly improved the UI, including over 2,000 usability tests.

New UI:

Clearly, you’re marketing to IT managers. Are you reaching out to end users?

Ed: We’re actively reaching out both online (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, etc) and offline, trying to help people understand the power of Notes. When I was last in London, I met with a blogger to try to understand why he was so frustrated with Notes.

Why do so many people hate on Notes?

Ed: Users live in their messaging environment, and blame everything from network problems to a full inbox on Notes. But in this case, the ease of Notes deployment means many current installations are ten years old or more. They’re functional from an IT perspective, but still using the older UI.

Previously, I suggested that the next wave of knowledge management innovation may come from consumer applications invading the enterprise space. What are you doing to make the enterprise more accessible to users? (How are you avoiding a device-centric model?)

Ed: Notes has an online component–not just e-mail and calendar, but multiple collaborative tools including integrated IM, bookmarking, etc. We support Blackberries, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. RIM, in particular, is a huge partner, not just because they’ve deeply penetrated the enterprise space, but because they’re actively supporting this partnership. We’re also starting to partner with more startups building off the Notes platform–startups who traditionally weren’t in the enterprise space.

It was a fascinating interview–especially because IBM admits there are things that WERE wrong with Notes…

Over the past few years, Notes lost touch with users. David Allen may love the power, but those features are useless if people can’t figure out how to access them. It isn’t just poor training either–a proper UI intuitively guides users. (Note: I haven’t used R8, so can’t comment on current UI.)

What does the future hold for Lotus?

Clearly, Lotus is making money, and growing. Few web 2.0 companies can claim seventeen straight quarters of growth!

But refocusing on the international market avoids questions about Notes growth in the US market–a key group of core “small-medium enterprise” customers.

According to eProductivity founder Eric Mack, Lotus must shift focus:

The secret to a renaissance with Lotus Notes will be to focus on what end-users are doing with Notes. Come on, we are living in a web 2.0 world; users expect to have a say and they want to take ownership of the tools that they use. As long as [IBM] perceives Lotus Notes as something pushed down from the top–part of the ’system’–the tools won’t become personal.

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

Update: Originally I’d quoted Kevin as saying 10,000 companies use the Notes/Domino platform. Ed e-mailed me to say it’s actually 46,000.

As we “work” our way through the holiday (or winter break as the school system calls it) we are once again reminded of Mike Arrington’s skill at dominating the trainwreck formerly known as The Conversation. I’ve watched Mike at close range for some number of years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how he does this.

For example, several weeks ago we did a Gillmor Gang episode live onstage at LeWeb. For two days I noticed Mike trying to come up with an angle to run with - Loic LeMeur’s jacket fabric just one of several weak entrants - but nothing to write home or about. Yet within seconds of Loic making a comment about bloggers and what I’d like to call social mediots not having a life, Arrington suddenly lurched upright like a dog at the beginning of a hunt, then sat back in an insolent slouch.

You know the rest, if you were online anytime in the next several days. My guess is that as soon as Mike understands the opportunity, all other sensory input continues to be recorded and stored while he plays out the scenario he’s identified. Analyzing his posts would reveal much of the same dynamic, but Arrington has a few tricks up his sleeve that separate him from others. A few notes on the Arrington methodology follow:

1. Think of it first. Seems obvious, but so hard to clone. Mike is what’s known as a natural athlete, for whom the mechanics of hitting the baseball are perhaps learned the first time contact is made with the ball. The feel of a clean hit cannot be replicated but only repeated. With a new idea.

2. Know you’re right. This is why people call Mike arrogant. Have you ever noticed how arrogant Ringo Starr is. No matter how pleasant or hip or whatever the interviewer is, Ringo always has that “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not” vibe going, except Chevy stole that from Ringo. Arrogance when right is something else. And even when he’s wrong, Mike is still sure he’s right.

3. Be funny. Another big differentiator. (Ed note: Apple’s spell check redlines differentiator but offers differentiators as a replacement) Arrington has a sense of humor, which rules out most of his competition. The combination of being right and funny is devastating in almost every context, once you get out of high school where being right doesn’t matter.

4. Know that what you’re interested in is reason enough. It’s not considered politically correct to not care what the audience thinks, but if you care what you think and let that be representative of the audience, you are set. Another reason to call Mike arrogant, but I’d prefer listening to someone who actually agrees with what he or she is saying.

5. Know when to quit. Notice that Mike’s posts sometimes seem to just be moving along just fine and then… over. Even the endless stories about getting rid of Yang seemed appropriate once he was finally gone.

6. Listen to commenters. Just checking you’re still reading.

7. Portray the world in black and white, or Silicon Valley vs. virtually everywhere else, terms. People who see things the way you do, or who are absorbed in Silicon Valley culture, will rush to your defense while everyone else starts throwing stones. Delightfully entertaining chaos ensues.

8. Add a tinge of outrage about things that most people don’t get worked up about. It’ll just make everyone else even more outraged and, therefore, more likely to respond in the comments or on their own blogs.

9. Don’t take anyone’s shit. In fact, use it as an opportunity to entertain the masses.

10. Don’t be afraid to go on a random rant now and again. News isn’t the only that gets people talking and engaged with your site.

11. Love what you do.

There you go, the most important tips on writing a Mike Arrington blog post. Print it out and carry it in your wallet. I’ve left out some super secret ones, like how to control Scoble and 20 surefire post topics without Twitter in the title. You can get these and more by signing onto FriendFeed, opening a realtime feed, and waiting for Mike to comment. He promised me he’d be there, this time for sure.

[Image courtesy of Laughing Squid]