IBM's email

IBM has just launched its LotusLive iNotes service which includes email, calendar and contact management. It comes at an exorbitant cost of $3 per month for its services. I will say that it is pretty steep for someone who is trying to break into the market with a fierce competitior called Google. As a matter of fact, Google's applications cost $4 a month and it has a myriad of functions that aid people much more than IBM does.

Furthermore, IBM is merely a newbie in this field and its market share is miserable as compared to Google's. The idea of IBM's iNotes service is probably to enable a sleek and simple service system for the businessmen to use. The idea is that you do not need the rest of the fanciful functions, what you need are merely the key essentials.

Well, I must applaud IBM for identifying what businessmen usually use, but what they forgot is that businessmen are human as well. There is absolutely no doubt that they use email, calendar and contact management frequently but they do take a break and stop by other funky applications to take a breathe as well.

Take for example a phone, we usually use a phone to surf the net, SMS and to call out to other people but does that mean a phone should only provide these functions? The answer is a big fat NO. We want to experiment, to show our reach and our possession ability, so naturally the more functions there are, the happier we become. Look at the success of iPhone, they have a myriad of useless applications but so what? People still download them and keep it for their phone for fun.

IBM has to recognise that not all people purchase for functional purposes, some people buy for fun! Like me!