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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.
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.
Same here. I've not thought of lotus notes in years. The first, and last time, I was forced to use it was 20 years ago or so.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Wow. They sold them. I'm so... indifferent.
"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).
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.
Lotus Notes is sorta a cross-breed between Excel macros and MS Access. You're going to hate it for all the reasons IT people hate the latter too, but for the time I actually saw some kinda impressive business applications which somehow worked and delivered value. Our perception is usually skewed by the fact that we're only called in when it's become a Frankenstein's monster nobody really can understand or maintain or doesn't work right. I can already see the pattern, we've worked on a very ad hoc basis even in production. Now we're trying to introduce process and rigidity into the system, the end result is they go around us instead of through us. Yes, we have more staging and QA and whatnot... which doesn't matter because they read the underlying data and create their own DIY solution instead of ours totally outside the system. It's called progress.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
"it was automatically authenticated; no imposture was possible"
It used to be that if you had the Exchange admin password, you could send from any other user's e-mail address.
I know it was possible in Exchange 5.5 and 2000. No idea if it's still possible (unlikely) and if not, when it was changed.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
Consider that the product has value because it has a customer base which HCL believes is locked in enough that they can milk it for at least $3.5 billion.
... under American jurisdiction will upload your mails to servers in at least three countries... U.S., India and China. This means that your so called "private mail server" isn't private.
That said, I can't see this being an intelligent decision.
In every single course I hold on security, when the topic of enterprise e-mail services comes up, I nearly choke and laugh at whoever says something this stupid.
We use cloud for e-mail. That's it. Security for e-mail requires worldwide mass economy. That means that in order to properly identify threats in email requires scanning for anomalies that can only be detected when scanning on a mass economy scale. This allows patterns to be established and allows the threats to be identified by following the patterns of the senders, the servers, etc... the content itself isn't that interesting really.
Then comes stupid products like Cisco's Email Security Appliance. Don't get me wrong, the product really does work... but in order to work, it requires sending all mails that don't match specific hashes to a central location to be identified and managed on a mass economy scale. This means that spam and marketing and all that crap will be detected within reason, but all the mails you had hoped to keep private will be uploaded to Cisco to be scanned and identified. This means that an American company
Yes of course you have the option to not upload unknown mail... but about 99% of all real e-mail threats today will go undetected if they don't participate in the mass economy. As such, running something like ESA/IronPort is an absolute waste of money and time.
So... you simply should never run your own e-mail server anymore. There's no benefit or profit. So far as I know, all online e-mail services have enterprise migration solutions from Lotus available.
Oh... then there's another major reason to NEVER consider hosting your own e-mail. Governance. If you're hellbent on keeping you mail private, you're an idiot. By keeping your mail on cloud services, then you can never be accused of destroying e-mail. If you're an honest tech person... you wouldn't get this. But if you're a wall street banker, there's a 99% chance that at some time during your career, you'll be probed for suspicious activity. Using a service that maintains years of e-mail backups that can even recover deleted mails is a really good idea. In fact, it should be legally required... especially in governments and banks.
Then we talk about groupware stuff.
Well this is 2018... who the hell uses enterprise groupware?
I mean really, even if you have sharepoint and notes, almost no one in your organization is using it. They're using the latest and greatest online service instead. Slack, Teams, etc... In fact, they probably are using 10 of them. I've received at least 10 e-mails this year about the new official cloud platform for collaboration in the company... yep... 10 mails... all different ones.
So that leads me to the final possibility. Offline networks.
This includes military, oil networks, etc... NATO for example has their very own offline internet alternative. And the oil and fish markets also have this.
So... I can't imagine HCL keeping that business. Let's be honest, the Chinese government might be actively invading the U.S. through spying and such... this we can deal with. But India is a country where almost all modern scams originate. This means that the government doesn't have enforced regulation in place to deal with dishonest dealers. While India has over a billion people and probably over a billion good and honest people... there's always a percentage of opportunistic assholes ruining it for everyone. This is why we need laws... and I simply don't trust India's government... "Hello this is Windows Support... you have a virus" anyone? They were an organized and
Unlikely... I'd imagine that IBM almost certainly will move to the cloud for mail and groupware. They actually did more or less dump PCs for Macs over the last few years. It seems only logical that they could also move their groupware pretty quickly.
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.
Every org has systems, projects, customers, etc. for which they need to track unstructured or semi-structured info about. For highly structured stuff, RDBMS or domain software is often used. For lightly structured stuff, file systems or email are usually used. File-systems and email don't cross-reference attributes/categories very well.
But there's not much in-between these high-structure and low-structure tools. That's where Notes-like products come in handy. It's "soft structure", or incremental structure.
Notes had warts, but it worked at that one org. Maybe it needs like-minded people to work well. Many don't like communicating that way and/or don't like documenting their decision steps for others (or future self). Perhaps holding "secrets" closely gives them a sense of job security?
As far as Factor Tables, I suspect when layered, they are or can be made equivalent to neural nets, but I'm not smart enough to prove it mathematically. Keep in mind that which filter-table is applied and how much can also be controlled by factor-table(s) also. Keep on tinkering with them; it's an under-explored niche. $Billions are flowing into neural net R&D, why not investigate their cousins a bit?
Do you mean movement, or albedo (brightness) contrast? I'm not sure people have more contrast than say parks or desks. There are diff algorithms for auto-focus. The simplest is usually to maximize the sharpness of edges (gradients) near the center of the image; being that's where the user usually points the camera.
Table-ized A.I.
I spent a year developing on it, and that was in the early 90s. Remember, this was in the age of segmented memory models, so limited field sizes were pretty much universal. Handling any structure larger than 64kb was ridiculously complicated under the covers. The 80386 supported a flat memory model as early as 1985, but it'd be ten more years before there was Windows OS support for that (except under NT, which nobody ran on their client workstations).
So by the time it was possible to fix the limitations of Notes, it had already lost out in the market to Outlook and Exchange. Lotus put its efforts into modernizing it's flagship 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and slapped some half-assed. UI changes on top of Notes. But it never got the major overhaul that every major piece of software needed in the transition to 32 bit and beyond, nor did it track rising expectations in the UX area.
Still, the basic security architecture of the system beats most stuff that's out there today.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
HCL was already improving Notes/Domino as they were contracted by IBM to do so, also they were doing active development for other IBM products. In Asia, Europe, Africa, Middle East still have a lot of Business's using Domino/Notes. State Farm still has 10's of thousands of Notes Applications. A lot of companies have dumped Notes Email but there are companies that still have Notes applications and have tried and failed to find something else to put them in, etc https://www.redpillnow.com/a-n... https://prominic.net/2018/12/0... https://www.ibm.com/blogs/coll...
How's life in the hypocrite lane?