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DonH's avatar

Having spent several years watching IBM up close and personal while working on OS/2 at Microsoft, I breathed a sigh of relief when IBM bought Lotus. It was clear to me at the time that IBM would spend a ton of money and effort on Notes, but that every worthless "connectivity to OS/360 via CICS" feature that they crammed in would just make Notes less focused, more resource hungry, and less of a long term competitor. It was such an expensive and important acquisition that IBM bureaucracy could not help but smother it. IBM had a *lot* of VPs to feed.

Totally agree that the role of the directory was crucial to Microsoft's success, of course.

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Ed Brill's avatar

Well, I've had a to-do to subscribe to your writing and come read this for months, and I'm genuinely surprised nobody else from the Notes side has done so in the four months since you published.

I do find it funny you write this

" In other words, all this stress and talk about how great Notes is and how behind Microsoft is and yet Microsoft won. Crazy."

Microsoft won in email. Well, mostly, Google certainly has taken some of that market share by now as well. But Outlook did eventually displace Notes in corporate messaging.

But here in 2022, thirty two years after Notes was first introduced, it is still (as a HCL product) generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and is still used by over 10,000 companies around the world.

Microsoft eventually did with Notes exactly what you describe in this article. Defined it as email, a single category, bundled the email product with must-buy Windows CALs and Office, and argued it was therefore a no-brainer to use the "free" Microsoft product. There was no way to beat the Notes custom applications, despite numerous attempts to do so, so eventually MS - and Salesforce, and every other "Notes killer" - stopped trying. And those applications keep chugging along.

There is no doubt, some of the wounds on Notes were highly self-inflicted. I ran the business through many of them, directives from way up the food chain. A classic example that I'll share was when we were told we could not invest in any sort of predictive text approach in cloud email (for a new front-end called Verse, but it was still Notes) unless it was based on Watson, and the Watson team wanted a per-sentence internal transaction fee that would have completely eroded the profit margin of the **entire Notes business**.

I would love to some day be part of the "someday someone will interview all the principles and write a full 360-degree account". I've threatened to write a history book on the whole of Lotus Notes taken from the IBM/Lotus point of view; I did some Lotusphere presentations about it but there are so many stories that I can now share (good and bad) with the distance of history. But the product is still alive, so it has never quite felt like the right time. Maybe, someday.

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