Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Remember it was originally designed to handle the CIA's email back in the 1980s. It had strong encryption, distributed directory management, digital signatures, distributed certificate management, and a host of other capabilities that were decades ahead of its time.
Every time you received a Notes email (or indeed any kind of document) from another Notes user, it was automatically authenticated; no imposture was possible, and this was at a time when it was normal for SMTP to accept any input from any source that knew the IP address. At the time I was training people on this new email thing, and I'd open up a telnet session to the server and show them how I could forge an email from "The Lord God Almighty" with the subject line "Don't believe anything you read here."
Notes was never a bad email system. It had a very awkard client UI and a server that requried a more than room temperature IQ to administer, but you got things in return that people in the 90s didn't understand to be important yet. Things like two factor authentication and local encryption. If you lost your laptop. the data in Notes would result in a data breach. People still haven't figured out how to prevent that in a way that is affordable and simple to use and administrate. So while it was inexcusable that they never hired some HCI experts to clean up the archaic user interface, you still got a very modern set of capabilities all the way back in 1990s. People were frustrated with the complexity, but to be fair while Notes was asking you to handle things like generating and signing crypto certificates, you didn't even have the option with anything else back when it was introduced.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I guess it's time to link to this, which we ran into at work some years ago. Ended up getting printed as a poster and stuck on walls until The Mgt. complained about the swearing in it. Which was strange really, swearing seems to be a natural part of using Notes.
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
I used Lotus Notes at one place I contracted at years ago and loved it! I even started building an open-source version (got side-tracked by life, though), and it inspired an idea for "Dynamic Relational" so that columns (attributes) don't have to be hard-wired in RDBMS ahead of time. We have dynamic programming languages, why not dynamic RDBMS also? Create-On-Write, no DBA.
One can make quicks forms in Notes for tracking projects and systems. You could then look up details based on different parameters (query-by-example). Every message (form instance) had a unique ID, and you could refer to other forms via that ID alone. "See #12345 for more..." It's what SharePoint could have been if they didn't F it up.
Our implementation did have a glitch whereby it occasionally lost messages. I don't know if the product was outright buggy, or if the system admin didn't bother running the cleaning step often enough.
One of these days I may finish my open-source version. There are already some out there, but I don't like their feature set and UI.
Table-ized A.I.
Unfortunately this attitude was common during that time. Having been a software engineer myself, I understand that feeling, you put in a lot of work and focus on trying to make something so perfect, getting it to do everything that everyone says it wants. Only to have created something so complex that the end users actively avoid. Sure you can use this application no problem, but it like trying to explain a dream to someone else. It makes so much sense to you until you try to get someone else to figure out such madness.
As I have matured in my career I had grown to a point where I have to say No to a lot of development requests. Not because they are bad ideas or I am unable to program them. But because it would add complexity to the program that would become a sliding scale of bringing a product into becoming unusable. A lot of younger developers don't get it yet, and get confused when I OK a complex change to a product while reject a simple one. Mostly due to having experience with a full life cycle of a product, and I know what type of changes would become a rabbit hole of pain.
Notes was one of those early Windows GUI applications, so there was little experience with development for that platform, so the Notes design was innovated and brilliant and solved all the problems it was suppose to solve. However it was too much to what people actually really wanted, and most of these "stupid" people actually just had different sets of priories and interests, and never really wanted to dedicate a few weeks on learning a new product, where they only wanted to send email.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As I have matured in my career I had grown to a point where I have to say No to a lot of development requests. Not because they are bad ideas or I am unable to program them. But because it would add complexity to the program that would become a sliding scale of bringing a product into becoming unusable.
That's a big issue in particular with open-source stuff, it's not your users who are idiots who need to be brought around to your way of thinking, it's you who have created something that may be fine for you but it's nearly unusable for an outsider. A prime example of this was a well-known OSS video editing suite that a friend of mine, a 2D compositor with decades of experience, told me about. The alternatives were five-figure commercial products, but this suite was doomed to be a permanent also-ran because the devs were absolutely determined to keep doing it their way, which was different from how every other suite in the industry did it. They would argue till they were blue in the face that their way was perfect (it wasn't, it was just different), but couldn't see that by choosing to be incompatible with everything else in the entire industry they were dooming themselves to irrelevance, or at least lack of any mainstream adoption.