I’ve tracked Lotus Notes for years. It has a good email capability. When I used it, about a decade ago, it’s calendaring was clunky and so was everything else but the email was good. The administration was frustrating for our administrator and one day we just abandoned it in favor of the Netscape bundle, which was a little better and involve almost zero admin effort. Not that it mattered much, Notes was not a small company product. IBM pushed Notes and has succeeded in keeping it relevant but not (imho) deeply compelling.

IBM didn’t purchase Lotus for Notes. It bought Lotus in a desperate attempt to ensure that there would be office applications for OS 2 (remember OS 2?) but the value it got from Lotus was, in reality, Notes – the product created by Ray Ozzie, whom Microsoft have entrusted their technical future to. IBM grew the Notes business through the 1990’s and although there was a dip in sales a while ago, it has had 17 quarters of solid (often double digit) growth.

IBM may do even better with Notes 8.0. Notes 8 is the attempt to fix the UI, which has always been a bit broken or, to be honest, badly broken. I won’t be able to comment on this until I’ve played with it, but never mind. IBM has long known that the UI needed more love and attention.  The real challenge for Lotus comes from “left field”. It has pretty much neutralized the threat from Microsoft  (they share the corporate market). The problem is that the new wunderkind of the web (B and Google Apps & Gmail) will gradually, but irreversibly, take the market away.

Lotus is fighting for relevance in a market that is being redefined. It has its own version of just about every Web 2.0 capability I’ve ever come across. What it doesn’t have is a web site that is gathering millions of ad hoc users – and that’s what it needs.