Notes is dead
It’s no murder mystery, since killer Ray Ozzie is publicly dissecting the corpse on his favorite new tool: Weblogs
NOTES IS DEAD. Kaput, pushing up daisies, canceled, an ex-application (apologies to Monty Python and Hollywood intellectual property gatekeeper Jack Valenti for appropriating material from the classic “Dead Parrot” sketch).
According to police reports, Notes was killed by inventor Ray Ozzie, 45. Ozzie entered the Notes space on the Ides of August — Aug. 15, 2002 — armed with Version 2.1 of the Groove collaboration platform and its new peer-to-peer e-mail functionality. Notes, already weakened by years of assault by Microsoft and its Exchange/Outlook team, was finished off in recent days by Ozzie’s commandeering of another growing collaboration model: Weblogs.
In a series of Weblog postings during his summer hiatus, Ozzie began a one-to-many public conversation and self-interrogation with users, customers, partners, and the media. “I’d been wanting to begin experimenting with public blogs for quite some time, in order to experience what it would be like to integrate broader-based communications into my daily communications rhythms,” he wrote.
Ozzie admits to using himself and his family as a “living laboratory for various communications and collaboration technologies,” installing a T1 in his home in 1993 and addicting himself to “always on always connected” e-mail in the process. “Over time, I fully regained control of my own online life,” Ozzie continued, but his children had already moved on to the harder stuff: IM and Quake.
“They’re part of the “post-eMail” generation,” Ozzie acknowledges. “They check their eMail rarely … probably once every few days, e.g. for messages from their teachers … but keep dozens of constantly-open IM windows on their screens.” Ozzie’s observations triggered development of his next-generation peer-to-peer Groove architecture.
“The conceptual design of Notes happened in the very early 1980s. The conceptual design of Groove happened in the late 1990s — 15 years later,” Lotus founder and Groove investor Mitch Kapor tells me. “If you can start with a clean sheet of paper, you just have such advantages over carrying around a legacy architecture.”
Add Weblogs to that mix and Ozzie’s world view was shaken once again. “This medium has been completely immersive … truly fascinating,” he wrote on Aug. 15. “And I’ve experienced enough to have become convinced that a witch’s brew of revolutionary personal communications tools — IM, Groove and Weblogs — and their evolutionary mutations and outgrowths, collectively represent the ‘post-eMail’ world.”
Inevitably, the pressure to maintain a steady stream of Weblog entries drew Ozzie further out of his isolation — and into direct communication with what he calls “Notes people.” Lotus customers and partners were growing alarmed at IBM’s moves away from native Notes and Microsoft’s $51 million investment in Groove Networks.
One confused Notes customer wrote Ozzie: “I’m under HUGE continuing pressure inside to consider a move to Exchange because the cals [client access licenses] are already paid for.”
Ozzie also quoted a Lotus business partner who’s made a good living building and porting Notes applications as the client-server platform matured. “I want to leverage my skills and was working with rnext/r6, but in these times I see fewer and fewer of my customers rushing to upgrade.”
Ozzie began reassuringly: “Notes was and is an incredibly powerful platform for developing forms-based document sharing applications, and it has provided tremendous value for those who made investments in it.” But then out came the dagger: “But times have changed, and for a variety of good business reasons … people are looking to bridge their Notes investments … on their way into products such as SharePoint and Exchange.”
Ozzie details the pluses and minuses of Notes and Groove 2.1. Most users are not permitted to create Notes databases, and can’t deploy them across enterprise boundaries. Groove can “scrounge” messages in any Notes database, create a shared space, and connect users across firewalls.
Ozzie notes that developers can use “such powerful products as VisualStudio .Net to connect Groove shared space data to extant Notes databases as well as to other products such as SharePoint Portal Server.”
And the coup de grace: “Although surely not designed as a ‘migration tool,’ through its new integration features, Groove can act as a bridge for many types of interactions that include both Notes and Outlook users — an important consideration for merged Notes+Exchange companies, or companies considering their migration options.”
Groove 2.1’s enhancements turn IM into p-to-p e-mail, with threaded history, reply and forward buttons, archiving of both send and receive threads, rich text editing, and point-and-click linking to Groove documents, discussions, and shared databases.
“Even though the instant messaging has more e-mail-like features, it’s not e-mail,” Kapor demurs. But he doesn’t discount the strategic possibility that “over time there’s a successively tighter integration of Groove with stuff that Microsoft has — full service e-mail among other things. If that integration gets tight enough, then that combination really could be a replacement, all in all, for Notes.”
Ozzie’s unrepentant. “Since V2, I’ve leveraged the cool new ‘change notification’ mechanisms, so that I’ve now got some very smooth Groove/IM production and consumption rhythms — being interrupted when I need to be, and reviewing other stuff when I’ve got the time or the need. Convenient, integrated into my life, 10x better than eMail alone was for managing my projects and decisions.”
Notes, 20, will be interred after a private service.
