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http://www.killer-apps.com/contents/booktour/the_story_of_lotus_notes.htm


http://www.killer-apps.com/contents/booktour/the_story_of_lotus_notes.htm
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6.4.1 THE STORY OF LOTUS NOTES
    David Reed, former chief scientist for Lotus Development Corporation and
now a technology investor himself, recently told us the story of how the OCI
approach worked for the development of Lotus Notes, a software product that
allows organizations to create collaborative work spaces over local and wide
area networks (and now the Internet as well). Notes was released in 1990,
when Lotus's chief product offerings, the 1-2-3 spreadsheet program and the
Symphony suite of related products-themselves killer apps-had largely died
out. Notes became the company's principal source of revenue until 1994, when
IBM acquired Lotus for $3.3 billion, a price that largely reflected its
valuation of Notes.
    Ray Ozzie, a talented programmer who had designed Lotus's Symphony
product, came up with the idea for Notes in late 1984. Ozzie wanted to
develop a new approach to sharing information among PC users in a group. "In
those days," says Reed, "the idea sounded totally off the wall. PCs had
barely penetrated the market. Local-area-networks (LANs) were just starting
and it was not obvious what they were good for. E-mail had been heavily used
by programmers in DEC and Software Arts, where Ozzie had worked earlier, but
Lotus did not use E-mail at all. Windows 1.0 was a cute idea, but a
technical dog, and Ray's product idea depended on the multitasking
capabilities of Windows. There was no market case for such a product, and
most people could not imagine why anyone should care."
    Nonetheless, Ozzie believed that the idea would take off once a critical
mass of networking applications and PCs with the power to support graphical
interfaces and multiple applications running simultaneously were available
at reasonable cost. Lotus founder Mitch Kapor shared that belief, but
neither could say when the prerequisites would be met. There was no sensible
way to make a business case for investing the resources it would take to
develop the Notes concept sufficiently to decide whether it was a winner or
not.
    Kapor, a leader as well as a visionary, found a way to keep Ozzie
involved with Lotus. The solution was a new investment model that aligned
the interests of both parties while managing the uncertainties of the Notes
project. Kapor formed a new corporation called Iris Corp., which was founded
solely to develop the Notes concept into a product. The structure of the
transaction was unique. According to Reed, "Lotus was committed by contract
to fund the development of the product, but Lotus did not own the product.
Instead, Lotus had the right to review progress periodically and decide
whether to continue funding the project. As long as Lotus continued to fund
the project, Lotus had the right to take the product to market at the point
when it was ready. If Lotus stopped funding the project or decided not to
bring it to market, Iris was free to take the product to market by any means
it chose, including working with another company, such as Microsoft."
    Between the time the project was initiated and the time Lotus brought
Notes to market five years later, there were many inside Lotus, Reed says,
who felt that the investment in Iris was a bad idea and urged Lotus's senior
management to cut Iris's budget. "Typical questions raised were: `Why are we
wasting some really talented people on a wild goose chase?' `Before we
cancel project XYZ, shouldn't we look at the money we're pouring into Iris?'
and `What does Iris have to do with our strategy?'" Unlike other projects,
however, Iris had a contract in hand that gave it leverage in such
discussions. Their leverage, however, was limited to the value Notes had
outside of Lotus-if the project really had no value to the market, then
Lotus could easily drop its funding. "As a result," Reed says, "Lotus was
highly motivated to invest resources to learn how to bring Notes to market
in the most effective way. If the best possible analysis determined that
Notes had no value, then Lotus would suffer no remorse at writing off its
sunk costs."
    After several years and multiple senior management reorganizations
(including the departure of Kapor), an entrepreneurial manager brought the
product to market, and after a shaky start in 1990, Notes gradually evolved
to become the centerpiece of Lotus's strategy and the basis for IBM's
hostile takeover in 1994. Says Reed, "I'm convinced that had Notes been
handled as a `normal' internal development project, the pressures to apply
the best talent to short-term crises, plus the uncertainty about when the
market would materialize and what the demand would be, would have caused Ray
and his team to be reassigned, and the project would never have happened.
Or, alternatively, had Notes become known as the `chairman's pet project' it
would have been overprotected and would not have had the close scrutiny that
it did receive, resulting in a much more polished product and positioning
when it was finally introduced."
    Managing innovation as a portfolio of options, as these stories suggest,
requires new skills. It also requires leadership and will. As we will
explain in Chapter 7, the disruptive power of digital technology alters the
roles and relationships between I/S executives and the rest of the
management team in many ways. From the standpoint of innovation, senior
executives must now be involved in technology investment decisions. They
must take ownership of the portfolio and manage it, as Mitch Kapor did, as
if the future of the organization depended on its paying off. Because it
does.