1: Current Lotus business strategy

ASP News Review: What do you see as the key issues in IT at the moment?

"We're going through big state changes still. For all of the popularity of the Internet in the past two or three years, most of what I would describe as phase one was about static publishing and go-fetch consumption. Today we're seeing real interactive applications built for everything from employee and customer self service all the way to commerce. Which is a completely different, much more complex, interactive and I think interesting technological feat than go-fetch or static publishing.

ASP News Review: Are there any particular messages for the general market as a whole, and for the reseller channel?

"We're obviously in a launch phase with the new version of the product, R5, and this whole 'superhuman software' campaign which is meant to codify our notion that more powerful, web-based collaborative platforms are really providing a lot of business and social empowerment that we think is obviously pretty important.

"R5, like every software project of this size, it was about 120 days later than I had hoped. By software standards that's probably pretty good, but it was still tense at the end. But I think we did the right thing - the mature thing - by doing in a sense the unpopular thing of waiting until we had a quality product. Other companies have been willing to be more iterative at the consumer's expense but I didn't think it was appropriate for us.

"I'm very excited about the product. It's about nine million new lines of code. This is a big effort. Wholesale reintroduction of a blended user interface that's lot more web-centric. Lots more scalability and reliability work. The application development and the mail and messaging capability blending even more definitively so that the application design experience for a Notes client and the application design and deployment experience for a web browser are one and the same thing - which took some work.

"So that's a big deal. Every software vendor that launches a new product thinks it's the next thing that's going to sort of change the world. We're as guilty as the next person. But it was a huge effort. We had a thousand people working on this thing for 17 months I think."

ASP News Review: Will it change the way people look at Lotus?

"No, I don't think so. I think the reality is that it was the necessary thing to stay ahead of Microsoft competitively. Most of the industry analysts pretty much readily agree that we still have about a two year technological lead over Exchange. Which is a little unfair actually because they're different things. So it's a little like apples and oranges. But nonetheless it's a very advanced collaborative platform. So I don't think we recreated the category. I do think we continued to extend the technological lead we've had, and I think from the perspective of our customers, we've done a lot to further reduce the total cost of ownership - with more central administration capabiilties, and more remote low-touch capabilities with software upgrades.

"So I don't think we changed the world here, but I think we raised the bar competitively."