Lotus Notes actually precedes the widespread adoption of e-mail in business in the 1990s (although not the development of e-mail technology which started 30 years earlier). It's groupware capabilities was one of the things that gave it a competitive advantage over the alternatives and helped it become one of the two clear winners in the client/server e-mail war (it still has 40% of the enterprise e-mail client market). Today, the existence of collaborative applications built on it are a major reason why its market share remains stable.

Lotus has a clear strategy today of using Notes as the client to its “Enterprise 2.0″ applications. Sure, a lot of the time, browsers are great. But for mobile users, slow networks, and companies who do not invest enough in a responsive infrastructure, a client with offline support is a major differentiator. So I'd always though of the strategy in those terms, but your post brings another dimension to it.

If we embed social collaboration into the same integrated client as e-mail, that can become the user's comfort app., and we can lead the gently into the new world without them feeling they have to give up the old one. Maybe that will turn out to be a stroke of genius (certainly, Matt Cain;s recent writing for Gartner around Notes seems to be very enthusiastic about this idea, although it is not expressed in these terms).

Great article. thanks for sharing your creative thoughts.

I don’t buy the 1-to-nine ratio as a threshold for adoption either. I don’t think Goureville could possibly have meant that.

Stuff that spreads by wildfire generally does something completely new, rather than offering an incremental improvement, no matter how large the increment may be. When something stands head and shoulders above the rest, it’s often because it’s a completely different animal, not just a larger beast.

Has there been direct substitutes for email in the past ? which have not succeeded ? (and therefore?) Is it wrong for to work on new tools that can substitute email for collaboration ?