Microsoft News Tracker

Reading the tea leaves with Eric Doyle at The Register:

Confidence is brimming at this year’s Lotusphere conference, with a belief that the IBM Lotus collaboration products are bouncing back against Microsoft.

At the conference, in Orlando, Florida, Lotus general manager Mike Rhodin said: “Our growth was in double digits last year [10 per cent] and the market only grew by about four per cent. So we must be stealing market share from someone.”

Actual market analyst figures will not be available for a month or two.

The only independent comment came from a Gartner analyst when he prefaced a question with congratulations to Lotus on its improved performance last year – Gartner’s official evaluation of the collaborative software market is not due until June.

You may recall that in advance of Lotusphere, Microsoft announced some migration tools to entice Lotus customers to switch and last year, Steve Ballmer said that the Lotus customer base was “ripe to be plucked.”