After 23 Years, IBM Sells Off Lotus Notes (techcrunch.com) 105
"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.
Re:Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
"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).
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Re:Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It's the developers too, they need to show on their resumes that they worked on something "innovative".
They didn't need a resume any more since they were working for Lotus. They had now reached perfection.
I'm only half-joking when I say that...
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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.
You then go on to explain your reasoning to them, right? Even if it only gets through some of the time, the world will be a little better place.
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Ah, yes... kinda like Apple's old advice: you're holding it wrong.
I was a Lotus Notes user with my previous employer and it wasn't terrible to use. Just different from every other mail interface out there.
Re: Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:2)
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You need to put this in context. When Notes/Domino first came out; it was a great product! You have to compare it to what was out at the time. IBM, internally was on Profs, (which was a green screen program, but still hands down one of the best email clients of all time). Now on the PC, for the corp. world, you had Word Perfect Office, CC Mail and MS Mail. They were all pretty darn bad! Lotus comes out with this awesome application that doesn't just do mail, but you can easily write real world, large
So (Score:3)
Re:Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"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.
Re: Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:2)
If you are the admin, you can trivially give yourself âsend as userâ permissions.
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Funny, that. "Send as user" was trivially easy, but actually reading a user's email wasn't.
Case: I was asked by management to spy on a user's email so they could confirm suspicions that she was doing naughty things. After making sure that management understood the implications, and getting the directive in writing, I proceeded to configure exchange to echo said user's email to a journal. Well, it would have been easier to reset her password, sign on as her, and put an auto-forward rule on her mailbox. Excha
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Well said, I have no points so I'm modding you up with my mind.
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Sure, Lotus Notes was great!
Well, aside from the fact that things like Agents and views were objects in the same database tables as the messages, which meant that any processing of messages had to be capable of also processing any agent that decided to appear...
Or the fact that Lotus Notes documents had limited sizes on their fields, including such problems as not allowing any more than a few KB of data without a line break or the entire message would crash the DB.
Or the fact that support of alternate chara
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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 limitation
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Lotus Notes was built for business administration more then End User functionality. It was one of these tools that worked well (at the time) in Large institutions, but became a huge headache for smaller companies, and god help you if you had it for your home PC
It took a while for Outlook to get a hold in the business market, it took some maturity in Exchange before the big businesses can get conned into using it.
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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 thre
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Domino and Notes where a groupware distributed database engine which made it great for some applications -- any kind of database really and it was an integrated environment with replication engine, UI, workflow, and data all combined. It was a generic groupware platform/engine and they implemented an email system on top.
Outlook actually had this sort of thing too - Outlook Forms. However, Microsoft recognised that all this complexity and the trade offs for having a generic platform with email/calendar/co
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It was THE worst mail interface and groupware suit I have ever had the misfortune to use.
Now I wonder if any folks around here are old enough to have used the old IBM mainframe email system called PROFS. The thing was later rebranded as OfficeVision . . . and then they tried to port it to PCs as OfficeVision/2 . . . oh, which ran . . . or didn't . . . on OS/2.
Yeah, I'm sounding like the Monty Python "When I was a lad we lived in a cardboard box by the side of the road" guy.
I found it amusing that when IBM bought Lotus, they added the "lightning bolt" icon . . . that was normal on SNA 3270 "s
Re: Notes is maliciously bad. (Score:2)
It looks like (Score:1, Funny)
Windows is finally done
Another great investment by IBM (Score:2)
These idiots can't decide what they want to be. Lotus Notes? Jesus...I thought that piece of crap died off years ago.
Re:Another great investment by IBM (Score:4, Interesting)
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No shit, Sherlock? No, I thought the "after 23 years" part of the title was talking about how long someone else owned it.
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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.
Indian Business Machine (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Used notes an a company (Score:2)
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Since IBM uses Notes internally for all its employees, I suspect that a large chunk of that money is going right back to the buyer to pay for licensing.
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I'm sorry... let me scrape this gunk from my ears and eyes... Notes was a DOS 2.x and 3.x thing?
Quote from Wikipedia "Lotus Development Corporation originally developed "Lotus Notes" in 1989."
MS-DOS 4.01 was released November 1988. Lotus Notes 1.0 requires DOS 3.1 or higher.
Back in the dark ages of computing when we wrote software, we didn't really care what DOS version was running. Most of us replaced every major aspect of the operating system. We often left the file system in tact, but we al
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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
Re:Used notes an a company (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Let me just say that you're a disturbed person in general. You like Notes which is clearly against the current and you are implementing something closer to a finite response filter than a neural net for AI... you really like to swim upstream
P.S.
I've used a combination of your approach of "factor tables" and neural nets for decades. You're onto something. I have to admit though that convnets have proven extremely interesting to me in recent times. I don't li
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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 ha
Re: Used notes an a company (Score:2)
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Ditto. My former employer went to MS products. Haha.
Nobody Kills A Company Like IBM (Score:2)
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 t
Notes was an ugly email system. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I agree the system had its limitations, particularly in style. It was still extremely powerful for its time.
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But it's not the 80s or 90s anymore. No one cares that it was better than a bunch of other three-decade-old turds.
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It is still better in many ways than systems people still use. For example if the DNC and RNC were using it, it wouldn't matter that the Russians hacked into their email system. All they'd get is strongly encrypted gibberish.
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Are you talking about IBM or about SAP?
I'm so... (Score:3)
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Sold them? I had no idea those products still existed!
The nineties called... (Score:2)
I Dissent! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Sorry for the typos and lack of proper syntax in some of the above; the ideas are still there. I was rushing in the final edit to get to the dinner table before my spouse declared it all "too cold to bother!" :-)
--Carol Anne (aka "Friday")
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Another error I made: I typed "1995" when "2005" was my intent. There is a 20-page brief of Steve Miller's direction of the Domino/Notes deployment posted at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/solutions/pdfs/g325-1358-00.pdf
It validates much of what I've described here. And, in discovering that document, I found that I'm in the development team photograph, on Page 5...I'm in the front row.
--Carol Anne
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Carol, you are a treasure. Thank you for the experienced and honest insight.
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I invite you to prune my original post to make it better. --Carol Anne
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largely because Lotus, (and even worse, IBM) didn't bother to create an infrastructure AROUND Domino/Notes
This is also the reason why no one has properly unseated Exchange / MS Office either. A lot of people focus on the individual functions of the software while ignoring the whole. Then they wonder why it isn't the year of Linux on the desktop.
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Horseshit. I worked for IBM and even they couldn't make using Lotus notes bearable.
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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
Email? Calendar? (Score:1)
> 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.
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The other flaw was that the original remit was to build a flexible system that could be expanded with specific tools the organization needed to evolve for best results within their own unique environment. Most businesses are so broad in scope that the universality of the Notes client features were considered primary, groups (in the SlashDot emulation!) were second-tier, and most people never tried to develop anything more than simple utilities that could be added to Domino/Notes for maintenance-level tasks
And nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
Meanwhile, the friggin' US State Department expects you to submit documents using a Lotus-based form while the rest of the world uses Acrobat.
Still programming in IBM notes (Score:2)
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I must demur. Opening up Domino/Notes to public attempts to "improve" it would lead to multiple spins-off that would never improve on the original. The issues that need to be addressed are HUMAN, not Technological; Managerial, not inherent in the software. Only some organizations are capable of profitably deploying the extant product...the failures of the product have, in my experience, largely trying to fit the product into a semi-dysfunctional (and/or rigid) institution and environment.
Domino/Notes has
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First Notes/Domino Experience (Score:2)