Tom Evslin drove the WorldNet project at AT&T and helped develop what became Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.
In a new interview on The Register web site, Tom Evslin tells a story about what was going on at Microsoft around 1996, after Internet connections had become more and more available, both for companies and in private homes.
As a person who was a part of the Internet revolution, I find articles like this very interesting. But it was this paragraph that really caught my eye:
“Bill Gates was willing to put lots of effort and money into Exchange because he was very afraid of Lotus Notes,” Evslin says. “He felt that Lotus Notes could become a platform the way that Windows was, which would be an enormous threat to Microsoft. And so he saw Exchange as a Notes killer.
According to Evslin, this lead to Outlook and Exhcange being rushed out to the market. In combination with Office and the Windows NT operating system, Bill Gates thought this might kill Lotus Notes. Gates felt they should worry about the Internet later, something Evslin disagreed with.
In the long run Gates and Microsoft did manage to get the upper hand when it came to email, and today Exchange/Microsoft 365 is the biggest email platform in the world. The article asks whether this mens Gates was eventually right. Partly, yes. But it would take years before what now is the Microsoft 365 Copilot suite was been able to come up with a suite that was as versatile as HCL Notes/Domino was already back then.
Most of my friends from the Domino community knows that a lot of companies that claim to have moved over to Microsoft 365 mostly mean mail and calendar, while they are still running business critical solutions in Notes and on the Domino platform. And the fact that Gates saw Exchange as a Notes killer means that he mostly looked on it as an email platform. Which it never was. That was only a part of the product. An important part, mind you.