More importantly, Lotus was one of the first companies in the PC software arena to get to grips with PC applications that weren't stand-alone applications running on just one PC. In 1994, Notes was one of very few application software products where software installed on multiple computers interacted to deliver the total result, and enabled people to share those results -- collaboration.

It had servers that actively ran application code that dealt with many users at once. This was new to the PC world. And when you installed Notes, it just worked, too. Mainframe software vendors understood all this well, but it was pretty new stuff in the PC world, and of course by 1994, Lotus and Iris had been working on Notes for nearly 10 years, and selling it for 5. They really understood both the technology issues and the corporate culture issues of what they were doing, and that gave them a big edge. Lotus had a rather shaky financial existence around this time, but the technology edge was enough for IBM to buy Lotus in 1995 and give Notes a secure future -- one that's lasted nearly ten years already.

Ten years on, Lotus is at a transition point again; from Notes and Domino to Workplace. But it's actually a much smaller transition. Last time, the change was pretty fundamental, from a stand-alone killer app -- arguably the first PC killer app, and certainly one of the most important, the spreadsheet -- to a wholly different technology, that of client/server, solving an entirely different problem, and, I think it's fair to say, producing another killer app along the way.

The Notes to Workplace transition is actually rather simpler -- it's just the technology that is changing, from client/server to host/dumb-terminal. The business problems being solved are fundamentally the same ones that the Notes/Domino family already solves -- moved forward by the foundations that Notes has already built. We could spend quite a bit of time debating spending money on making a new solution to supplant a perfectly good one that we already have, but that's not what I'm writing about here. Nor am I debating whether Workplace lives alongside Notes, or whether it is the replacement for it. This should become clearer at Lotusphere.