Ray Ozzie Interview With Network World.
Tuesday
marks the 20th anniversary of when Ray Ozzie founded Iris Associates,
the company that created Lotus Notes, and the 15th anniversay of the
introduction of Lotus Notes v1.0 at the Academy of Arts & Sciences
in Somerville, Mass. To mark the occasion, Network World's Paul
McNamara interviewed Ray last week and published this interview. Here's
an excerpt:
Q. Take us back to the day when you trotted out Notes 1.0.
A.
At the time Notes was launched, Dec. 7, 1989, we had one customer —
Sheldon Laube from PriceWaterhouse — who shared our vision. He
understood enough about it and he's a great communicator, much better
than we were about the value of Notes at the time.
It was a
very fortuitous time for Notes to be coming out because people were
just using LANs for printer sharing and they could now leverage that
simple technology for lightweight processes within the enterprise. By
'95 or so the leading-edge companies started to try to use it outside
the company, not just inside. We take this for granted now, but it was
fairly interesting and it turned out to be difficult because Notes, in
particular, was designed for centralized management. It was fairly
burdensome from an administrative perspective for good reason: It was
the way that you managed the directory, the way that you managed the
security was all designed for the data center and for IT, and it was
difficult to extend that to an environment of multiple IT
organizations.
That was ultimately what led me to leave and
start Groove. I thought to myself, if fundamentally the business
environment were going to be changing to be more of a mesh than a set
of vertically integrated corporations, then this problem that we were
seeing was going to occur more and more and more in that these
firewalls that we had built around our organizations and the
centralized IT groups would increasingly not be reflective of what the
business units within the companies needed to do, which was work
seamlessly outside the company. Whereas Notes was more about the
changing nature of the organization, Groove was about the changing
nature of business in general. [Groove.net Weblog]