Wolfgang Sommergut

Lotus Notes feiert am 7. Dezember seinen 15. Geburtstag. Die Network World bringt aus diesem Anlass ein Interview mit Ray Ozzie, dessen Firma Iris Associates mit der Entwicklung von Notes begann. Ein halbes Jahr zuvor hatte Tim Berners-Lee das Konzept für das spätere World Wide Web entworfen. Nicht zufällig antwortet Ozzie auf die Frage nach den größten Versäumnissen in der Geschichte von Notes mit einem Hinweis auf das Web:

We missed — but I missed clearly — the immense value in simple publishing. Notes was and is an amazing interactive system around messages and forms and documents and things like that, and in order to use it you have to authenticate yourself to the system so that there’s some security and you build these apps and it works really well.

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When I first saw the Web — Mosaic — I am ashamed to admit that I said to myself, this is so trivial, it’s got no security, you can’t authenticate, the server doesn’t know who the user is — so all you can do with this is simple publishing. I should have foreseen earlier on in Notes the value of a simpler, anonymous client/reader that could have been used for a much broader set of applications than it was initially.