At 6:52 PM 9/25/95, Jon Lasser wrote:
Perhaps the Notes pricing scheme is sooo outrageous (by the standards of a student like myself, and probably most others, if it's still anything like it was at the 1.0 release) that mostpeople have had zero opportunity to examine the program, let alone really have time to play with it?
I've never even _seen_ a copy of Notes running on any machine, nor do I know directly of _any_ of my colleagues who has. (Not saying nobody has, of course, just that I can't find anyone I know well who has.) I've been following the news on Notes for at least several years, even to the point of buying some Lotus stock several years ago on the strength of what I had read about Notes. (Alas, I sold it soon thereafter, before a run-up in price.) My point? Notes is nearly invisible in the non-corporate community I now hang out in. Who knows what weaknesses or bugs it has in it. Folks on our list probably don't have much familiarity with it. My hunch is that, as the "Wall Street Journal" reported yesterday, that IBM overpaid for Lotus, that the notion of Notes becoming the universal collaboration/communication option is flawed. (I've been saying for a while that the Web serves that purpose better, and that Web browsers will likely edge out Notes. Apparently I was hardly prescient, as Netscape recently bought Collabra, which is pushing that point exactly.) --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."