.NET Or J2EE? MS Or IBM?

Last week I had a beer with a former colleague. He now works as a freelancer for a large company. His goal is to come up with a decision matrix wether to migrate applications to .NET or J2EE (WebSphere). He asked what I’m thinking of the Workplace.
„To be honest, I think it’s a replacement for Notes/Domino“ I answered.
He tought the same. „But they have a lot to do till then.“
He throws a few stones towards IBM and their Marketing. MS has a named exclusive key account manager for this project. IBM? Nope.
He swarmed for Visual Studio and the thight integration to .NET (Didn’t surprise me).
I mentioned about Open Standards and Java, but we came to the result that WebSphere is also proprietary because it had to differ to other application server systems.
This was only a little abstract of the talk that evening. I’m looking forward for the next „meeting“, Udo.