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After 23 Years, IBM Sells Off Lotus Notes (techcrunch.com)
"IBM has agreed to sell select software products to HCL Technologies," writes Slashdot reader virtig01. "Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool, Lotus Notes and Domino." TechCrunch reports: IBM paid $3.5 billion for Lotus back in the day. The big pieces here are Lotus Notes, Domino and Portal. These were a big part of IBM's enterprise business for a long time, but last year Big Blue began to pull away, selling the development part to HCL, while maintaining control of sales and marketing. This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house. As for HCL, it sees an opportunity to continue to build the Notes/Domino business. "The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets," C Vijayakumar, president and CEO at HCL Technologies, said in a statement announcing the deal.
I have used Lotus Notes. Unfortunately.
It was THE worst mail interface and groupware suit I have ever had the misfortune to use. Worse than MS Outlook, by far, and that's saying something, because Outlook itself is a red hot mess.
I can only imagine the management incompetence that led to spending $3.5B for that mess of software.
Windows is finally done
These idiots can't decide what they want to be. Lotus Notes? Jesus...I thought that piece of crap died off years ago.
Not much fits within their "make money, not stuff" vision anymore. They'll be selling mainframes next, but probably keep research for a while, to generate more patents, until they run out of Chinese grad students. Then they'll just coast the rest of the way out.
In a previous incarnation the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster. I think IBM is very lucky to palm this off to get $1.8 billion for it after paying $3.5 billion those many years ago. Good work, IBM. I wonder how much they lost over the years trying to maintain it.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
At least they bought Lotus this time instead of their usual partner with the company and then waste it's resources till it's dead.
Real shame just the same. Lotus 123 was a much nicer spreadsheet than excel, their word processor wasn't bad not up to word but it could have been, and notes was far more powerful than Exchange right up to the early 2000s. Be interesting to see what the new owners do with it, I am betting on them mining the existing customer base hard. Once you are on Notes, it's very difficult to get away from it.
But it was a really interesting platform for building cryptographically secure document management systems.
Email was just one possible application that could be built on that platform; you could also build things like blogging and content and distributed, cooperative workflow management systems on it, complete with strong encryption and cryptographic authentication, including robust features like trust revocation and certificate signing delegation. And this was back in 1990, when people were using Windows 3.0. Active Directory was still ten years in the future, but it was feasible to deploy a system with tens or even hundreds of thousands of users using Notes even then.
This was also a time of exponential growth in computer adoption, and there were chronic shortages of people with even basic administration skills. It took green administrators weeks of training to learn the basic concepts in crypto and distributed directory management before they could operate even a basic Notes installation,yet Lotus and later IBM tried to position it against Outlook and Exchange.
It didn't help that Lotus never got its head of its ass when it came to UX, nor did it ever really do a good job of explaining to people the vast scope of collaboration management applications that could be built on Notes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow. They sold them. I'm so... indifferent.
Will he do the needful and revert the same if he has one doubt?
I'm amazed and slightly nostalgic that such a horrible and unfashionable product can still be mentioned on a tech site, wow! What this this mean for the remaining twelve users?!!
They don't sell lube in the commisary. The only lube for Tyrone and Bubba will be Jr.'s tears.
Already, the Slashdot post today has been overflowing with the complaints of the nay-sayers who never participated in a successful and productive deployment in an organization. I pity their glee.
Au Contraire, Mon Ami. Domino/Notes was...in the right hands, a very valuable tool for many companies and organizations. I had literally dozens of happy corporate clientele during my Domino/Notes consulting era, because with the right objectives and roll-out it made a powerful tool organizations (usually the larger of those) could use to improve revenues and lower costs. Some of those companies are still using it to this day, and will rue having the owner (and therefore, support, off-shored to India, where good products can sometimes go to die).
When it was deployed in haste, and everybody got it all at once in a large corporation, it was usually a catastrophe, largely because Lotus, (and even worse, IBM) didn't bother to create an infrastructure AROUND Domino/Notes, and did a relatively poor job of inspiring the cadre of people like me who actually understood the possibilities (although they did give me a lot of leads that led to the success of my consultancy).
My strategy was simple: DO NOT ROLL IT OUT TO THE BUSINESS. Show them proof, from other companies, so that one small corner of the large corporation could grasp the benefits, and have it deployed properly, to fit a business need and show a benefit to both users and the corporation. It was NOT an "email system," although it had a eMail as part of its' core...a rather good one, that was easily adopted by novices.
My strategy, developed at DuPont (my first major client) was to find one business unit that was vital to corporate revenues, but having trouble, or excessive costs. An example: One division was hidebound with obsolete, incompatible array of products that people hated to use because it was easier to pick up the phone a make a call; that didn’t require a few days’ of learning time in a fast-moving organization. We replaced their incompatablities with ease of use through feature integration, and they suddenly turned to the new tools with glee. Another application was for all the far-flung Production Managers, who came back to Wilmington (Delaware, corporate HQ) to share solutions to production line efficiency...a couple of times a year. We gave those worldwide employees Notes clients and put the Server in Wilmington, and they began to solve problems more quickly and efficiently (often in days, instead of waiting months), and the results paid for the first years' adoption for the two original projects, including training and the usual unanticipated start-up costs, and showed a net profit. In the second year, other business unit managers were CLAMORING for the Domino/Notes solution; we sorted through them and declined about half, and the other half were successfully served. As of 1995, I know most of them were still being happily relied upon as a problem-solving aid.
The IBM purchase of Lotus was good for the investors, but IBM stopped evolving it when they bought it. There were the usual updates & versions, of course, (to keep the revenue flowing) but no real effort to broaden the market (e.g., to corporations with far-flung offices, or mid-sized companies verging on growth into the Big Leagues). Once all the major corporations to whom they catered were served, it was just a "maintenance" market, insofar as I could see.
It will be interesting to watch the acquiring company's sheparding of the product. Will they rely on updates and consulting to existing customers, or will they actually re-scale versions of the products for new markets that are emerging, rather than rely on the revenue from maintenance upgrades? There are large swathes of corporations in the $100M-to-$1B market that could be served, if they choose to revitalize the talent that is still out here, many of whom have long ago retired, and been replaced by people who still need to bridge the "Knowledge Gap" between extant technology and
> Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool
And *this* is why the whole thing failed.
Notes was *never* an email system, it has always been as fairly decent groupware system with a rather crappy email application built on top of it. I suspect, had Lotus (or, later, IBM) totally ditched the email side of it, then then maybe people would have realised what market it was actually meant to serve. Then it *might* have had a chance of success.
Once of those great mysteries - what would have been and could have been if the source code was not lost. Would we even know Exchange? Would that have changed or delayed the trajectory of IBM? (Shaking magic 8 Ball)
(Reply Hazy, Try again)
I am wondering what will happen with 389-DS/FreeIPA and IBM Directory Server/Identity Manager. It makes no sense for IBM to fund development of both, as 389-DS serves as the upstream for Red Hat Directory Server. Will they ditch their IBM version? Will they halt development of 389-DS/RHDS/FreeIPA?
Lotus notes is used in the CIA quite a bit. it's the only reason it is still around.
I subcontracted for them a few years ago. What a clusterf**k. The one person with technical chops got made into a manager. Their timekeeping system sucked bigtime. They tried to hire me away from the company I was working with, in direct violation of their agreement with that company.
Meanwhile, the friggin' US State Department expects you to submit documents using a Lotus-based form while the rest of the world uses Acrobat.
Place I worked had 1000's of applications running under Notes. All terrible and painful to use. Most frustrating thing about the email client was the total incompetence it had to search for anything. You could be looking at an email message subject list on your screen and search on one of the displayed subject texts and get ".... not found".
IBM finally migrated the email client to a cloud application then called Verse. We all just called it what it was "Worse" !
This is a good thing as HCL has already been programming for IBM for years and they had taken over development for Notes and Domino recently, IBM had been slow on development with domino/notes for years due to their main focus on Cloud computing, which they tried with Notes/Domino in Bluemix, however that didn't quite work out and a lot of IBM's Notes/Domino customers didn't want to move Notes/Domino to the cloud. HCL has already added Node.js to Domino 10 and they are redoing the client . We've switched off Notes email just this year and that wasn't even due to employee's wanting a change, It was mostly due to one of the higher ups wanting Office 365, though I hear quite a lot of complaints about Office 365 from the actual people who use it with applications everyday . Yes there are companies that still have 10's of thousands of IBM Notes applications, though I know not very many companies these days still use it. I"m sure we'll switch off of it eventually but with hundreds of applications it's not the easiest thing to do when your a small shop.
I worked for Lotus back in the day. Notes was extremely effective, tho we had the benefit of custom in-house development. It's hard to believe this product even exists today, being the bloated dinosaur it is. Its model has uses still, sure, but why lock your organization into dependency on a closed product like this? Well, they would like you to, because that would make change from this platform extremely difficult. HCL should just open source the entire product and let the Internet at-large have its way with it.
I worked at IBM for about 15 years. Lotus Notes was big, slow, and bloated. It's not like Microsoft Outlook is any better. But I hated Notes. Good riddance.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Domino/Notes still has a significant customer base. Organizations that adopted Notes in the 90's and who've long since migrated their e-mail and collaboration software to Exchange and Sharepoint are still paying for licenses. Because Notes was so customizable, customers who bought it for e-mail developed all kinds of solutions for inventory management, change management, ticketing systems, invoicing systems, purchase ordering systems you name it. Even though Notes was a shitty e-mail client (so bad that it ships with a companion app "Zap Notes" to help users wrestle back control of their workstations after Notes' crashes), by the time a company wanted to switch to something else, migrating the e-mail and calendar functions were the least of their problems. The real problem that still persists today was how the hell these companies were going to replace all the in-house systems of record built up around Domino/Notes over the decades. That stuff doesn't transition easily to other platforms without complete re-writes, and with so much integration and interdependence it was difficult to replace even one, because then all the others would run into problems or stop working or need to be changed. Rewriting decades of in-house software customization all at once is in expensive and near impossible task for most businesses who are busy trying to make money. Thus many companies who no longer use Notes for e-mail still keep it around because they cannot shake all the other bits and pieces stuck on to it over the years and the cost of rebuilding all that stuff on an alternate platform is too much to bear.
One thing that Notes had done better than most is support for every platform imaginable. Use a Mac? no problem. Running Linux? - here's your native client. And unlike Microsoft Office of today, all the versions on all the platforms were functional equivalents. They are all equally compatible, powerful and shitty to use.
Back around 2000 I was working as a PC technician for a Fortune 500 company. We had Notes 4.6 deployed when a particularly nasty virus hit (back in the good old days of Windows 98, I don't think our workstations had NT or 2000 yet). I remember reading the news about companies being brought to their knees by this virus (Melissa?) that were using Outlook/Exchange. Domino never had the same problems with it and we only had a handful of workstations hit and it never spread. For all its ugly ugly UI and UX problems, the backend of Domino was super powerful and secure. I got my first development experience on Domino working on Java and XML for the first time (I don't think JSP was around yet). I wish IBM hired some real UI/UX experts to turn it into something the masses would use. Oh well.
No one I know loved Notes, and most people barely tolerated it. Lots of people outright hated it.
When I see a product like that, I think "that product has missed the mark. No matter what it's merits are, it is too little good and too much bad."
Same goes for DFS, same goes for SharePoint, same goes for OpenText. Lots of systems get over-engineered, too complicated to use, and ask too much before you really start seeing some ROI. A well-designed system allows for quick wins, plus a ramp-up from that to much larger organizational level gains. The point is to build some momentum and allow people to see the longer-term promise of the system.