Lotus Notes turns 15 tomorrow. Iris Associates, the software development company from whence Notes emerged – on the Lotus dime – was founded five years earlier to the day. That’s reason enough to get Ray Ozzie on the phone, given he was the headliner for both productions before leaving Notes Nation in 1997 to start Groove Networks. What follows are the highlights of our chat, with a longer version to be found here.
Do you ever get tired of talking about Notes, maybe the way singers get sick of doing their big hit?
That’s funny . . . I don’t get tired of talking about it, depending on the conversation and which way it’s spinning. I get a chance to surf off of it into my current passions and what I’m talking about now, and I hope it doesn’t sound like the song that nobody wants to hear.
Take us back to the day you trotted out Notes 1.0?
At the time Notes was launched, Dec. 7, 1989, we had one customer – Sheldon Laube from PriceWaterhouse – who shared our vision. He understood enough about it, and he’s a great communicator, much better than we were about the value of Notes at the time.
This was an era of re-engineering the corporation. It was a very fortuitous time for Notes to be coming out because people were just using LANs for printer sharing, and they could now leverage that simple technology for lightweight processes within the enterprise. By ’95 or so the leading-edge companies started to try to use [Notes] outside the company, not just inside. We take this for granted now, but it was fairly interesting and turned out to be difficult because Notes, in particular, was designed for centralized management.
That was ultimately what led me to leave and start Groove. Whereas Notes was more about the changing nature of the organization, Groove was about the changing nature of business in general.
When did you know you had something big with Notes?
I’ll say something that lets you see a little bit about my personality: I knew we had something before we started the company.
Looking back, were there any aspects of Notes that you had spot on from the beginning – or missed?
We missed – but I missed clearly – the immense value in simple publishing. When I first saw the Web – Mosaic – I am ashamed to admit that I said to myself, this is so trivial, it’s got no security, you can’t authenticate, the server doesn’t know who the user is – so all you can do with this is simple publishing. I should have foreseen earlier on in Notes the value of a simpler, anonymous client/reader that could have been used for a much broader set of applications than it was initially.
One of the things we got right . . . is the respect for offline use and mobility. You have to know from Day 1 when you’re building a system that you want to treat mobility as a first-class problem. I think we got that so right, and it amazes me to this day that more people haven’t gotten it right.
Why do you think that is?
It’s hard, and you can’t add it on, particularly the integration between the storage, communications and security.
Are there milestones through the early years of Notes that you thought particularly important?
This is not widely written about but I think customers understand it: There was a thing called “The Nifty 50.” It was a set of application templates that were starter apps, so to speak, that were built on top of Notes 3. It bridged a lot of people into understanding and they just started to build more things.
In Release 4.5 e-mail and calendaring became world-class. It was concurrent with the release of [Microsoft] Exchange, and it suddenly set in motion thousands of companies putting out RFPs for e-mail systems and then picking one, either Exchange or Notes.
The last major event is in ’95 when IBM bought Lotus. People don’t realize this, but we had shipped about 2.2 million seats of Notes before IBM, and IBM rapidly jacked that up to 100 million-plus.
What was your reaction when it was first made clear to you that IBM was going to buy Lotus?
[IBM CEO Louis] Gerstner looked me in the eye one-on-one and said, ‘Ray, we’re not going to spend $3 billion on Notes, $3.5 billion on Lotus, to screw it up, so stick around and we’ll make it what you wanted it to be.’ I was willing to give them a chance because it was extremely genuine. No, I didn’t like the fact that Lotus was losing its independence, but so many people had put so much love into that product for so long that we wanted to give it a chance. And they did what they said they were going to do.
What’s your sense as to whether Notes will continue on as an independent product?
IBM has a history of never forcing its customers through tremendous changes; there are S/360s out there that are still cranking along. So I don’t see that they would do something so reckless as to stop something. What’s very clear is that Notes has transitioned into a cash cow; it’s not at the leading edge of their initiatives. Workplace is at the leading edge, and they would like to for very pragmatic business reasons sell more DB2 and Websphere and the things that they regard as more contemporary technologies than Notes. So I think you’ll see a lot of marketechture that unifies two architectures, and you’ll see active selling efforts on the newer stuff. The older stuff will gracefully stabilize.
We should all be so lucky. Comments to buzz@nww.com.
