IBM Lotus Notes Takes a New Turn in its Long Historical Run

We wonder if Ray Ozzie ever thought that he would someday looking from Microsoft’s executive suite to see IBM release his Lotus Notes creation into the cloud.

That’s what IBM did today. Lotus Notes is now as much a cloud platform as it has ever been with a set of new features that have traditionally only been available on-premise. Before we dive into the details of the news, let’s look at Lotus Notes from a historical context.

In 1973, David Wooley created PLATO Notes, an online message board. According to Wikipedia “Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO while attending the University of Illinois in the 1970s. When PC network technology began to emerge, Ozzie made a deal with Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, that resulted in the formation of Iris Associates in 1984 to develop products that would combine the capabilities of PCs with the collaborative tools pioneered in PLATO. The agreement put control of product development under Ozzie and Iris, and sales and marketing under Lotus. In 1994, after the release and marketplace success of Notes R3, Lotus purchased Iris. In 1995 IBM purchased Lotus.”

After several years at IBM, Ozzie left the company and later started Groove. Ozzie later sold Groove to Microsoft, which used it to create Sharepoint. Today, Ozzie serves as one of the architects for Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud initiative, which competes directly with IBM in the race to move applications to the cloud that for years have resided on-premise, solely operated on personal computers.

LotusLive Notes includes rich email, shared calendar and instant messaging for $5 per user per month.

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