Ray Ozzie: 'It Wasn't Like I Had a Choice' — How Lotus Notes Bet on the Future
Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Ray Ozzie, who cut his teeth on the PLATO system's chat and email in the 1970s, co-founded Lotus Notes in 1984 to bring that collaborative magic to the PC. He recalls the era's constraints—256KB of RAM, shipping on OS/2 and Windows in '89—and the philosophy of being opinionated when standards don't exist. Notes didn't win the standards war, but Ozzie remains proud of pioneering concepts that later became universal.
It wasn't like I had a choice, you know? I had to do it. Because it was just super compelling, and everybody was ignoring it.
- danielovichdk
Ray was, and probably stille is, a great architect and programmer.
He made us younger Microsoft employees feel like there was room for technical people in the top of the company.
Microsoft was actually always good at that. They know how to treat their people right
- GMoromisato
I worked on both Lotus Notes and Groove. What's great about Ray is that he has the capacity and drive to be involved in every part of the project. He drove high-level business requirements and wrote code and also cared about icons and colors. But he did it all without arrogance and allowed his team to argue back when necessary.
In case anyone is interested, a while back I wrote about another Ray Ozzie project: Live Mesh: https://gridwhale.medium.com/live-mesh-and-the-future-of-com...
- weinzierl
This was an enjoyable read. Especially the idea of someone living and creating between eras resonates with me.
I've seen and played with Lotus but I'm too young to have worked in any environment where it was the primary communication tool.
Still, my take away from OP is that Ozzied strived for Lotus to be much more than an email client.
Lotus makes much more sense as an attempt to bring the collaborative features of a shared university computer system with email, chat, forums, shared documents and applications to an ordinary networked PC like environment.
Something bigger than a weird email client.