David: You've been involved in Notes since '92. Tell me how Notes has evolved.

Scott: Boy, where should I start? We started working with Notes on version 2, so a lot has changed. I guess I'd have to say that there've been two generational leaps in the product's life.

The first was the change from v3 to R4. When Mussie Shore introduced the new UI at Lotusphere in 1995, it was (I'm just a bit embarrassed to say) one of the most exciting moments of my career. He got a spontaneous standing ovation from the -- what? -- 10,000 or so in attendance. It was about as good as geeky excitement gets, and for good reason. They had touched every single bit of the platform and every single bit got better. LotusScript was introduced in R4 and it blew the doors open on functionality and extensibility. If v3 was a horse and buggy, R4 was a car. While the car has gotten a lot nicer and faster since then, there just hasn't been another single jump that significant.

The second leap, which came more gradually, was the push to make Notes a Web-based platform. Even though that happened a few versions ago, the expanding capabilities for Web applications have been really terrific. Continuing to enhance its rapid deployment design capabilities toward a browser-based audience is keeping Notes on a path that will let it continue to be a core technology moving forward.

David: How has the use of Notes evolved in companies since then?

Scott: Well, there's a dichotomy of sorts out there. On the one hand, you have a group of companies that use Notes for email and calendaring and not a whole lot else. That's like having a Ferrari in the garage and only using it to drive to the grocery store. I mean, yeah, it will do it, but that's kind of missing the point.

Fortunately, there's a much larger segment of the business world that's making the most of what they're paying for. They're always looking for ways to do more with less. Notes is ideal for that because it is so much faster and easier to develop applications than in just about anything else. More and more, a lot of our clients are deploying their client-based applications to the Web to bring in subsidiaries, affiliates, vendors and others while still leveraging the Notes back-end.