At the University of Illinois, Ray Ozzie worked on
PLATO Notes, one of the earliest collaboration applications.
Later he wanted to develop collaboration
software of his own, but couldn’t find funding. After
he led the development of Lotus Symphony, Mitch
Kapor and Jonathan Sachs decided to invest in
Ozzie’s idea, which would become Lotus Notes. Instead
of working as an employee, Ozzie founded Iris
Associates in 1984 to develop the product for Lotus.
It was an unusual form of startup, but it worked.
Lotus Notes was the first widely used...

capture some window that will happen in the future.
In Notes, it was (and this is hard to imagine because it was a different time)
the concept that we’d all be using computers on our desktops and therefore we
might want to use them as communication tools. This was a time when PCs
were just emerging as spreadsheet tools and word processing replacements,
still available only on a subset of desks, and definitely no networks. It was ’82
when I wrote the specs for it. It had been based on a system called PLATO...

in a secure manner. So we went for a desktop architecture.
Livingston: So this is a big problem that you were approaching. How did you
start?
Ozzie: Before I start a company, I typically write a couple of founding documents.
One of them is very outside-in: it’s a scenario-based document, describing
the high-level challenge that I’m trying to address and the end user
scenarios that we are trying to solve. This attempts to explain what we’re trying
to accomplish to anyone who joins the company or we might need to get financing
...

sure we could build it, we decided to hire the first 15 to 20 people and just
embarked on the project.
Livingston: Masterless synchronization was a novel technology that you guys
really had to work through?
Ozzie: It had been done for years in a variety of settings—especially in an academic
setting. But the commercial PC environment is a very harsh one. People
Ray Ozzie 105
reboot PCs, they restore them from backups, they lose them. It has to be very
resilient. We wanted to make sure the algorithms we were using...

There tends to be some time where I’m building up a level of technological
advantage for when we get to market. With technology, there’s no such thing as
a sustainable advantage, but you can get a good running start if you concentrate
on doing something hard really well.
In Notes, it was the database and replication environment and the security
aspects. In Groove, it was the security aspects again and this transaction synchronization
and the peer-to-peer XML-based communications. Most people
find risk and uncertainty very daunting. In both Notes and Groove, there was...