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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.
"Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool, Lotus Notes and Domino."
Saying Notes and Domino are everyone's favourite email tools is like saying syphilis and gonorrhea are everyone's favourite STD.
(Yes, I know it was meant sarcastically, but that's roughly what Notes and Domino equate to).
I have used Lotus Notes. Unfortunately. It was THE worst mail interface and groupware suit I have ever had the misfortune to use.
I talked to one of the original Notes creators once. Notes was brilliant, it's just that people didn't understand it. Everything in it was just the way it should be, it wasn't the Notes creators fault that everyone else was an idiot and didn't appreciate their fine design. That was roughly their attitude towards their users. It was like talking to a schizophrenic who tried to convince you to live in his world, and was convinced that that was the only way that was right. Even within IBM they never integrated, they staunchly maintained their not-one-of-us culture.
In fact, that's true. IBM intended Domino/Notes to sell more hardware. They NEVER reached out to the experienced community of competent Developers, Deployers and Roll-out experts who actually made Domino/Notes successful in many corporations. Again, read the IBM promo of the DuPont experience: It actually misses explaining how Steve Miller (lead on the project) collaborated with potential groups of users, to make sure that #1) They had problems for which Domino/Notes was a viable solution, and #2) They were ready, willing, and able to make the CULTURAL changes within the organization to mate with the software tools.
When people rammed Domino/Notes down the throats of their employees (at all levels), they failed. See the excuses the Procter & Gamble made when they turned to Microsoft after not following the Lotus guidance and DuPont's approach. Many of the naysayers haven't looked into the underlying reasons for their particular experience with failures in Domino/Notes deployment.
IBM made similar kinds of mistakes, even as they extolled the product (but ignored the corporate structure and cultural issues) to potential customers.