• "2005 double-digit growth in the Lotus Software brand." What sort of growth? Is that revenue growth in the professional services group? Or profit because expenses have been reduced at a greater level than revenue reductions? Or actual deployed seats? Or customer awareness? Or what?
• "Workplace has grown exponentially, we've got thousands of new customers." Sounds great, but with a very small number of deployed seats, exponential growth is to be expected and doesn't translate to success. And "customers" probably means "seats" -- perhaps even planned seats rather than "deployed seats."
• "Over 125 million licenses sold today." That suggests live seats. But that's way too high a figure. Maybe it means all licenses sold during the history of Notes/Domino, including those never actually deployed.
• "Met internal targets." No comment, since we don't know what those internal targets are.
• "Lotus products grew 7% in Q405 at constant currency." No idea what that means.
• "Gain in market share." What gain in what market? For example, it might mean that market share has grown in the world of Icelandic fisheries, at the expense of Eudora.

Notes/Domino is an excellent product with substantial market share and a loyal customer base. It's a great business. We would be delighted to own just 1% of it.

But if Lotus is successful in the way it wants these statistics to imply, it should avoid citing obscure, ad hoc statistics. Any business can find statistics that suggest success, even when they're headed for bankruptcy tomorrow. Read any venture capitalist's prospectus to illustrate.

To be persuasive, Lotus needs to make clear statements like: "Software revenues up 12% in calendar 2005 over calendar 2004, and up 25% over calendar 2003," or "We have 30 million seats on maintenance controls -- that's up 15% over this time last year." ... David Ferris