Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early

This really stood out to me:

> products like Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, they enabled the domain practitioner to potentially solve problems themselves. They’re democratized problem solving. A real estate officer or a plumber can solve their needs without having to involve third parties and explain to them the need

That may be true for people who have the freedom of action to craft and use their own solutions. It reminds me of the explosion in domain apps unleashed by Visual Basic.

It is very much not true for your average office jockey or line employee stuck using some line of business app, and where access to powerful tools is not allowed or is even banned. Billy in Accounts cant fire up Claude even if he wanted to and running Ollama on his work machine is a fireable offense. So he wont ever be able to finally fix those TPS reports even if he is the one guy with the knowledge to do so.

I'm not arguing that this isnt sound IT policy, but I do expect a fair bit of shadow IT to spring up when people internalize that keeping their job requires them to showmassive AI powered productivity gains.

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...

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

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.

I still miss Groove.

why is there no scroll bar in this article?

> Because polish is in the eye of the beholder

Polish is also a matter of taste and expertise.