Lotus Is Dead. Long Live Lotus
November 22 2012 01:00:00 PM
Add/Read Comments [12]
Update: Apparently not everyone is aware of the saying from which the title of this post was taken. "The King is Dead. Long Live the King" is a positive statement, alluding to the continuity of leadership when the throne changes hands. With that in mind, read on...
Over the last few days I've had dozens of inquires about my thoughts of IBM removing the name Lotus from Lotus Notes and Domino, effectively putting to rest the Lotus brand name. Rather than respond to everyone individually, I figured I'd post my Lotus eulogy here.
I started with IBM in 1993 as a coop student working with Lotus Notes 2.1a and left in 2008 when I went to work at Socialtext. During those years I had the privilege of working with one the most significant collaboration portfolios of all time. Many people consider Notes the progenitor of all the "enterprise social" hype we are in the midst of today. Back then it was called Groupware, and I remember one of the original slogans, the 3C's: "Communicate. Collaborate. Coordinate." Oh how well that message still resonates. Over the years the Lotus portfolio grew, adding products like Sametime, Quickr and eventually Connections. I remember Carl Kriger and Jim Cavalier doing demos of Notes applications running on mobile devices (Nokias, Palm Pilots and Blackberry) more than a decade ago... long before the reign of iPhones and Android. I remember Gary Devendorf doing demos of Lotuscript as he created all sorts of collaborative applications. Gosh I remember when there were product managers not for entire product lines, but for specific features; like Sean Condon being responsible for Domino clustering and replication, two technologies that most products still can't duplicate today. I remember when iNotes first appeared providing web based access to mail, years before people were fighting for invites to this thing called "Gmail beta". Oh how ahead of the times Lotus was. Yes, I still feel the scars from the rants about Lotus Notes on Slashdot and the User Experience Hall of Shame. Yet so many applications today have tabs along the top to access content and/or use screens filled with icons to open applications... just like Notes. I guess "There's an app for that" has been around for a long time. No, I've not forgotten the missteps like Workplace, J2EE and the two-lane highway but today is a day to focus on the positives. I spend so much time in the "2.0 world" watching startups with these brilliant ideas... all the time thinking "Lotus did that a decade ago." Yes, Notes was (is) far more complicated than it should have been, but it really was a brilliant product. Thank you Lotus for providing me a great start to my career. I'll always remember you, and look forward to watching your descendants in the IBM Collaboration family carry on your mantra as expressed in poster below... "Helping people work together is what Lotus does best."
For anyone doubting IBM's commitment to the Notes product, I encourage you to watch this video on IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition, where they demonstrate the upcoming release.
As for my specific thoughts about the name change, I still stick with what I said at the beginning of 2011: "Years ago I talked about how I wished the brand names would go away completely. Finally the lines are blurring between the brands and technologies from each group are finally being combined. All the divisions of IBM are involved as social features are mixed with analytical tools, cloud storage, compliance and other management tools. So how do you name that? Die-hards in the "yellow bubble" can protest all they want, but I think the best thing for everyone would be to just call it all IBM software. That did not happen this year, but I think it is something everyone should expect at some point."
Reminiscing about Lotus caused me search out the response I posted back in 2008 to vowe's question "What would you do, if you were in charge of Lotus?" It's a fun read, I encourage you to take a look.
I'll leave you with a few items from the history book to enjoy.
I AM! (trivia, who drew the original poster?)
Lotus 50 Million Super Humans - 1999
Helping People Work Together Is What Lotus Does Best
Over the last few days I've had dozens of inquires about my thoughts of IBM removing the name Lotus from Lotus Notes and Domino, effectively putting to rest the Lotus brand name. Rather than respond to everyone individually, I figured I'd post my Lotus eulogy here.
I started with IBM in 1993 as a coop student working with Lotus Notes 2.1a and left in 2008 when I went to work at Socialtext. During those years I had the privilege of working with one the most significant collaboration portfolios of all time. Many people consider Notes the progenitor of all the "enterprise social" hype we are in the midst of today. Back then it was called Groupware, and I remember one of the original slogans, the 3C's: "Communicate. Collaborate. Coordinate." Oh how well that message still resonates. Over the years the Lotus portfolio grew, adding products like Sametime, Quickr and eventually Connections. I remember Carl Kriger and Jim Cavalier doing demos of Notes applications running on mobile devices (Nokias, Palm Pilots and Blackberry) more than a decade ago... long before the reign of iPhones and Android. I remember Gary Devendorf doing demos of Lotuscript as he created all sorts of collaborative applications. Gosh I remember when there were product managers not for entire product lines, but for specific features; like Sean Condon being responsible for Domino clustering and replication, two technologies that most products still can't duplicate today. I remember when iNotes first appeared providing web based access to mail, years before people were fighting for invites to this thing called "Gmail beta". Oh how ahead of the times Lotus was. Yes, I still feel the scars from the rants about Lotus Notes on Slashdot and the User Experience Hall of Shame. Yet so many applications today have tabs along the top to access content and/or use screens filled with icons to open applications... just like Notes. I guess "There's an app for that" has been around for a long time. No, I've not forgotten the missteps like Workplace, J2EE and the two-lane highway but today is a day to focus on the positives. I spend so much time in the "2.0 world" watching startups with these brilliant ideas... all the time thinking "Lotus did that a decade ago." Yes, Notes was (is) far more complicated than it should have been, but it really was a brilliant product. Thank you Lotus for providing me a great start to my career. I'll always remember you, and look forward to watching your descendants in the IBM Collaboration family carry on your mantra as expressed in poster below... "Helping people work together is what Lotus does best."
For anyone doubting IBM's commitment to the Notes product, I encourage you to watch this video on IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition, where they demonstrate the upcoming release.
As for my specific thoughts about the name change, I still stick with what I said at the beginning of 2011: "Years ago I talked about how I wished the brand names would go away completely. Finally the lines are blurring between the brands and technologies from each group are finally being combined. All the divisions of IBM are involved as social features are mixed with analytical tools, cloud storage, compliance and other management tools. So how do you name that? Die-hards in the "yellow bubble" can protest all they want, but I think the best thing for everyone would be to just call it all IBM software. That did not happen this year, but I think it is something everyone should expect at some point."
Reminiscing about Lotus caused me search out the response I posted back in 2008 to vowe's question "What would you do, if you were in charge of Lotus?" It's a fun read, I encourage you to take a look.
I'll leave you with a few items from the history book to enjoy.
I AM! (trivia, who drew the original poster?)
Lotus 50 Million Super Humans - 1999
Helping People Work Together Is What Lotus Does Best
Very good article. And poignant. Half way though the 'I AM' video, a shot of Manhattan with the twin towers.
A different age for us all.
---* Billll
It is much easier to change a brand than a product. I am yet to see a customer that migrated to another platform because the product was called Lotus. And while Connections is selling well I have no indication that other products like IBM Sametime or QuickR are now selling much better since dropping the Lotus name.
I admit that this might be a good strategy to sell to big companies who buy a whole software stack.
Personally I like that IBM removed the Lotus brand. It takes away an excuse for poor performance and the products are moving in another direction anyway (which isn't a bad thing by itself).
Henning, I know I am biased, just as every football fan is biased towards their own team, but I do not get where you are coming from.
I would absolutely agree that many mail centric customers have stopped using Lotus Notes and that many application centric customers are reluctantly hanging on to it while using exchange for mail and struggling to find a suitable replacement.
Ironically Notes has never been stronger and better in terms of the value it adds. The XPages functionality HUGELY increases what can be done with the platform in terms of applications and it is obvious that IBM has and is continuing to invest heavily in XPages.
Microsoft is superb at sales and marketing. IMHO they have done an amazing job of choosing to fight an email only battle with Notes and winning it so decisively that the application battle never even started. The superior product from a collaboration perspective ( yes I am biased but I do believe it ) lost.
Could IBM have done more - absolutely - allowing easy integration with the defacto AD authentication protocol and providing connectors to Office across the stack would have really helped.
IBM, again imho, also had two big Achilles heels 1) they don't show the product 2) their sales people are not incentivised to retain customers.
The world has moved on, when my customers look back in 10 years time they will all have a connections / yammer type collaboration stack. The difficult bit is knowing at what point adopting that stack is the right choice for them. I firmly believe that for people on the IBM stack Notes will still be there at least for applications. We are also providing XPage solutions to non or ex Notes shops.
Notes was and still is about collaboration. Collaboration is not dead, its got to the point where people are actually beginning to understand what it is and how it can be useful.
iPhone apps have educated the world about what a workspace can be used for :-)
Great post, Alan.
The link to the Social Edition video seems to be broken, though.
Sean I still use Notes every day and I do believe it will be around in 10 years too and no surprise I am biased. It is not important where I am coming from because it is the customer who decides not me.
This is not a topic about how good or bad Notes and Domino are but about the retirement of the Lotus brand. To be honest I am not even aware of die-hards in the "yellow bubble" who demand IBM keeping the Lotus name. Even me is all for doing it. No more excuses!
I even fear that, by not dropping the Notes and Domino product names, we will have another discussion in the foreseeable future.
Nice historical blog post Alan, and I see your blog is running on it as well ;-)
Thank you everyone for the comments.
Laurent, yes my blog is still running on Domino. I will admit if it were easy to migrate everything (posts, comments, likes, etc.) I may move to a more standard blogging platform, but for now I'll keep on trucking along here, quirks and all.
Sean, XPages is an interesting topic. Yes, they provide a more modern architecture for Notes/Domino developers to update their apps, but do you think anyone new is developing using Xpages? (or has even heard of them) Most of the customers I work with are building apps on platforms like force.com or amazon.
Lars, sorry about the broken link, thank you for reporting. I think it may have been tied to my specific registration. I've updated the link with what I think is the generic landing page. Please let me know it it is working now.
Alan,
I would agree with your observations re XPages being adopted primarily within the existing IBM Collaboration community. I don't think IBM are really positioning it outside of that, or at least not via any practical initiatives.
As to force and amazon - almost all of the apps that I see in business where XPages or Notes is a candidate tend to be at least partially on premises. Internet connectivity in most of the sites I visit in the UK is still terrible. They also tend to be fully bespoke department specific or semi bespoke so the RAD aspect is important. Although RAD in Notes is better than RAD in XPages but it is not really a fair comparison as the outcome is much richer in XPages. The gap is also closing.
I would also imagine that the price point for a bespoke app on XWorks ( $2000 utility Domino server ) would be better than on Salesforce but I am happy to learn more about that.
The credit of creating a vision of a connected and distributed workplace, and the software needed to support that, does indeed go to IBMs Lotus Notes. It took the market time to arrive, partly because Lotus was a product of the IT controlled on-prem software era. The time has arrived, mainly because the internet has come to be accepted as a mature delivery mechanism, and a collaborative system does need the ubiquity of the internet.
Incidentally, my name Pankaj means Lotus.....
Hi Pankaj, yes IBM was ahead of the game with Notes. So now the challenge is to not be happy with that past and instead prove leadership now and in the future.
Poignant words, brought a tear to my eye ,,,, Lotus you were remarkable,,, and I fully endorse and can relate to : "Thank you Lotus for providing me a great start to my career" ,,,
I think shedding the Lotus name is helpful. Lotus is synonymous with legacy. I do not see how IBM will hope to compete with current frameworks, and ultimately survive. But I really hope they figure it out.