In 1997, Lotus Development, an incredibly innovative\nsoftware firm that had previously created Lotus 1-2-3, for a time the most\npopular software application on the planet, and Lotus Notes, for a time the\nmost widely used email and collaboration application, released a set of Java\napplets called eSuite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could say a lot of things about Lotus eSuite: it was,\nwell, very cool, way (way) ahead of its time, and for a very brief period of\ntime had the opportunity of dethroning Microsoft Office from its dominant position.\nReally. Well, maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it didn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What went right? What went wrong? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is my perspective. Why do I have anything to say about\nit? Well, I was intimately involved with eSuite. You might even say I invented\nit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Java and Platform Independence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In the bad old days of application development, you wrote an app in a language like C or C++ (or even assembler) which compiled\/assembled to machine code. That code could only be executed by the specific type of processor in the box, like an Intel 80386. Moreover, your code had to interact with its environment — say, Windows — which meant it had to call upon system services, like displaying a button or a dialog box. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you wanted to run your code on a different architecture, say a Motorola 68000-based Mac, you had to make massive changes to the source, because not all C compilers were alike, and because the underlying services offered by Windows and Mac were quite different. You coded a button on Windows very differently from one on MacOS or X-Windows. Hence at Lotus we had separate, large teams for Windows, OS\/2, and Mac versions of the same product. (In fact, we were occasionally criticized for having spreadsheet products that looked like they came from different companies: the Mac, OS\/2, and Windows versions of 1-2-3, built to conform to those platforms’ user interface standards, did <\/em>look very different.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back to our story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1995, Sun Microsystems released the first version of their new high-level programming language, Java<\/a>. As the first language to compile to byte codes, instead of machine code, it had huge promise because, the theory went, you could \u201cwrite once, run everywhere.\u201d In other words, each platform \u2013 Windows, Mac, Sun, Unix (Linux was still nascent) \u2013 would have a runtime which could translate the byte codes to executable code appropriate for that device. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps even better, Java\u2019s libraries (called the AWT, or Abstract Window Toolkit<\/a>) also “abstracted” (wrapped) the underlying operating system services with a common API. The AWT\u2019s function to create a button created a Windows button on Windows, a Mac button on MacOS, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cool! So why was this more than just a neat technical achievement?<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, Microsoft largely dominated personal computing, and its competitors, principally Lotus and Sun, faced existential threats from the Redmond giant. (I\u2019m not going to spend much time talking about how Microsoft achieved this position. There are many varied opinions. My own view, having worked at both Lotus and Microsoft, and thus having seen both companies from the inside, is that Microsoft simply outcompeted the others.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In any event, many saw Java as a godsend, having the\npotential to release the industry from Microsoft\u2019s stranglehold. In theory, you\ncould write an application and it could run on anything you like. So who needed\nWindows? Office?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even cooler, Marc Andreesen\u2019s Netscape Navigator<\/a> introduced a Java runtime into version 2 of their browser, which at the time pretty much owned the marketplace. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer followed with Java support shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everybody at the time recognized that browser-based computing was going to be terribly significant, but web-based applications \u2013 especially dynamic, interactive user interfaces in the browser \u2013 were primitive (and ugly!) at best. HTML, was both very limited and extremely fluid at the time; the W3C had only been founded in 1994 and in any event the value of web standards had yet to be recognized. Browser developers, seeking to gain advantage, all created their own tags more or less willy-nilly. A very primitive form of JavaScript<\/a> (confusingly, not at all the same as Java) was also introduced at this time but it couldn\u2019t do much. And the beautiful renderings that CSS makes possible still lay in the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, Netscape and IE introduced an <applet> tag which let you embed (gulp) Java code in a web page. Sounded great at the time: code in a web page! And Netscape had browser versions for Windows, for Mac, for Sun workstations\u2026you could write an applet and it would magically work on all of them. Wow!<\/p>\n\n\n\n A word on security (also kind of a new idea at the time, not\nwidely understood and \u2013 in my view \u2013 universally underestimated). A web page\ncould run Java in what was called a sandbox, <\/em>meaning that it was\nactually isolated from the various aspects of the platform \u2013 the idea being you\ndidn\u2019t want to run a web page that deleted all the files on your PC, or scanned\nit for personal information. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll have more to say about applet security in a moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Somewhere around this time, being between projects, I\nstarted playing with Java. I had in my possession a chunk of source code that\nJonathan Sachs, the original author of 1-2-3, had himself written as an\nexperiment to test the then-new (to PCs: yes, purists, I know it had been\naround on Unix for years) C language. (How archaic that sounds today!) I have\nto say before going forward that Sachs\u2019 code was just beautiful \u2013 elegant,\nreadable, and as far as I could see, bug-free. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I started porting (converting) it to Java. Now Java can\ntrace its roots to C and C++ so the basics were fairly straightforward.\nHowever, I did have to rewrite the entire UI to the AWT, because 1-2-3\/C, as it\nwas called, was not coded for a graphical interface. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And\u2026it worked! <\/p>\n\n\n\n I started showing it around to my friends at Lotus and\nultimately to the senior managers, including the Co-CEOs, Jeff Papows and Mike\nZisman, who saw it as a new way to compete against Microsoft. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Could we build a desktop productivity suite hosted in the\nbrowser that runs on all platforms and thus do an end-around around the evil\nRedmondians? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Suddenly (or so it seemed to me) my little prototype had turned into a Big Corporate Initiative. Some of my friends and colleagues started playing with Java as well, and soon we had miniature versions of an email client, charting, word processing based on our thick client app Ami Pro, calendaring and scheduling based on Organizer<\/a>, and presentation graphics based on Freelance Graphics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And my colleague Doug Wilson, one of the 1-2-3 architects,\ncame up with a brilliant way to integrate applets using a publish-and-subscribe\npipeline called the InfoBus, the API to which we made public so anybody could\nwrite a Kona-compatible applet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n InfoBus was really an amazing innovation. With Infobus we were able to componentize<\/em> our applications, letting users create what today would be called composite apps. The spreadsheet applet was separate from the chart applet but communicated through the Infobus \u2013 giving the illusion of a single, integrated application. So in the screenshot above you see the spreadsheet applet and the charting applet hosted on a web page. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty-five years ago this was pretty awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To make it all official, we had a name for our stuff:\n\u201cCodename Kona,\u201d we called it, playing off of the coffee theme of Java. (Get\nit?) Personally I loved this name and wanted it for the official product\nname\u2026but there were issues. More on this in a moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then a few things happened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In June of 1995, IBM (heard of it?) bought Lotus. I heard\nthe news on the radio driving in to our Cambridge, Massachusetts office, and\nwas both horrified and relieved. Lotus \u2013 frankly \u2013 wasn\u2019t doing all that well\nso getting bailed out was good; but IBM? <\/em>That big, bureaucratic\nbehemoth? <\/p>\n\n\n\n IBM purchased the company primarily for Notes, as their mainframe-based\nemail system, Profs, was an abject failure in the marketplace, and Notes, far\nmore technologically advanced, was doing fairly well. And since everybody\nneeded email, owning the email system meant you owned the enterprise \u2013 at least\nthat was the contention, and the investment thesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To my surprise, IBM showed far less interest in the desktop\napps (which we\u2019d named SmartSuite to compete with Office). They couldn\u2019t care\nless about what was arguably one of the most valuable brands of the time \u2013\n1-2-3. But Kona fit into their networked applications strategy perfectly, which\n(I suppose) beat some of the alternatives at least. <\/p>\n\n\n\n IBM had another strategy for beating Microsoft on the\ndesktop, and again, Kona fit into it like a glove: the network computer. The\nNC, in essence, was a stripped-down PC that only ran enough system software to\nhost a browser \u2013 no Windows, no Office, everything runs off the servers (where\nIBM with mainframes and AS\/400\u2019s ruled in the data center, and Sun dominated\nthe web). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, my. So we split up the teams: one focused on delivering\nKona for browsers, the other, led by my late friend the great Alex Morrow, for\nthe NC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeff and Mike, our co-CEOs, wanted to showcase Kona at Lotus\u2019 annual developer convention, Lotusphere, held every winter at Disney World in Florida, at the Swan and Dolphin auditorium. Ten thousand <\/em>people attended in person. <\/em>(Hard to imagine these days.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Including, by the way, the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, and his\ndirects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We had great plans for the keynote address. We developed a\nscript. We hired professional coaches to help us learn the finer points of\npublic speaking. We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. Larry Roshfeld would\ndo a brief introduction, then I would do a short demo on Windows, and then\nLynne Capozzi would show the same software (\u201cwrite once run anywhere,\u201d remember?)\non an NC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Things went wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First, my microphone failed. In front of this ocean <\/em>of\npeople I had to switch lavaliers: talk about embarrassing! (These days I tell\npeople I\u2019ve never been afraid of public speaking since; nothing that traumatic\ncould ever happen again!). <\/p>\n\n\n\n But that wasn\u2019t the worst. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In front of all those customers and executives, the NC crashed<\/em>\nduring poor Lynne\u2019s demo. She handled it with remarkable grace and as I recall\nshe rebooted and was able to complete the demo but talk about stress! <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now as competitive as Lotus and Microsoft were on the\ndesktop, there were, surprisingly, areas of cooperation. For a time, the\nprimary driver of Windows NT server sales was Lotus Notes, and so (again, for a\nvery brief time) it behooved Microsoft to make NT work well with Notes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And so Jeff, me, and several Notes developers hopped a plane\n\u2013 the IBM private jet, no less! \u2013 for a \u201csummit conference\u201d with Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We spent a day in Building 8, then where Bill had his\noffice. It was not my first time at Microsoft \u2013 I\u2019d been there many times for\nbriefings \u2013 but it was to be my first meeting with Bill. After several NT\npresentations he joined us during Charles Fitzgerald\u2019s talk on Microsoft\u2019s\nversion of Java, called Visual J++ (following the Visual C++ branding). I\u2019ll\nhave more to say about J++ in a minute. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This being my space, I asked a lot of questions, and had a\ngood dialogue with Charles. (I had more conversations with him over the years\nand always found him to be brilliant and insightful; read his blog Platfornomics<\/a>, it\u2019s great.) At one\npoint, however, Bill leaned forward and pointedly asked, \u201cDo you mean to tell\nme you\u2019re writing serious apps in Java?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n To which I replied, \u201cWell, yes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019re on drugs!\u201d he snapped. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus ended my first interaction with the richest man in the\nworld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, perhaps because of IBM\u2019s enormous leverage in\nthe marketplace, customers expressed interest in Kona and we got a lot of positive\npress. Many resonated with the idea of networked applications that could run on\na diverse set of hardware and operating systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And we were blessed with a superior team of technically talented individuals. Doug Wilson, Alex Morrow, Reed Sturtevant, Jeff Buxton, Mark Colan, Michael Welles, Phil Stanhope, and Jonathan Booth were just some of the amazing, top-tier folks that worked on Kona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As we drew closer to launch, the marketing team started\nthinking about what to officially name this thing. I \u2013 and actually most of the\nteam including the marketing folks \u2013 favored Kona: slick, easy to remember,\nresonant with Java. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We couldn\u2019t, for two reasons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One: Sun claimed, by virtue of its trademarking of the Java\nname, that it owned all <\/em>coffee-related names and they\u2019d take us to court\nif we used \u201cKona.\u201d I was incredulous. This was nuts! But we didn\u2019t want to go\nto war with an ally, so\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two: it turns out that in Portuguese \u201cKona\u201d is a very obscene word, and our Lisbon team begged us not to use it. We all were forced to agree that, unlike Scott McNealy\u2019s, this was a fair objection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The marketing team came up with “eSuite,” which, truth be told, I hated. But I understood it: rumor had it that IBM, our new parent, had paid their advertising firm tens of millions of dollars for their internet brand, which centered around the use of the letter “e” — as in eCommerce and e-business. (Hey, this was 1995!) So our stuff had to support the brand. I guess that made sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n eSuite was a beautiful, elegant set of applications created by an incredible team of talented developers, designers, testers, product management, and marketers. So why did it ultimately fail? Others may have their own explanations; these are mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paradoxically, the best <\/em>Java runtime \u2013 by far \u2013 was\nMicrosoft\u2019s. Sun had written a Java runtime and AWT for Windows but it used a\nhigh-level C++ framework called Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). MFC, which itself\nabstracted a lot of the complexity of the underlying windowing and input systems,\namong others) was great for building business apps (it was the C++ predecessor\nto Windows Forms, for the initiated). But it was absolutely wrong for\nplatform-level code \u2013 the AWT on MFC was an abstraction on top of an abstraction:\nas a result, it was sssslllooowww. <\/em>Similar story for Apple, and, believe\nit or not, for Sun workstations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft on the other hand rewrote the Windows version of\nthe AWT directly to Win32, in effect, to the metal. Hence it was way faster.\nAnd it re-engineered a lot of other areas of the runtime, such as Java\u2019s\ngarbage collector, making it faster and safer. Not only that, J++, as Microsoft\u2019s\nversion was called, was integrated into Microsoft\u2019s IDE, Visual Studio, and\ntook advantage of the latter\u2019s excellent development, editing, and debugging\ntools \u2013 which no other vendor offered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I attended the first JavaOne convention in San Francisco.\nMicrosoft\u2019s only session, which was scheduled (probably on purpose) late on the\nlast day, featured an engineer going into these details in front of an SRO\naudience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember thinking: okay, if you want the best Java, use\nWindows, but if you\u2019re using Windows, why wouldn\u2019t you just use Office? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now in fairness, the Java team was very focused on security;\nI mentioned the sandboxing notion that the applet environment enforced, which\nhas since become a common paradigm. They rightly worried about applets making\nunauthorized accesses to system resources, like files (a good thing), so at\nfirst any access to these resources was prohibited. Later, in v1.1, they\nimplemented a digital-signature-based approach to let developers create\nso-called \u201ctrusted\u201d applets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But that wasn\u2019t all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In effect, on load, the runtime simulated<\/em> execution\nof the applet, checking every code path to make sure nothing untoward could\npossibly happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine: you load a spreadsheet applet, and it simulates\nevery possible recalculation path, every single @-function. Whew! Between\nnetwork latency and this, load time was, well, awful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, if you only want to run a browser, and you don\u2019t need\nall the features of an operating system like Windows, you can strip down the\nhardware to make it cheap, right? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nope. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember chatting with an IBM VP who explained the NC\u2019s\ntechnical specs. I tried telling him that eSuite required at least some\nprocessing and graphics horsepower underneath, to no avail. In fact, as I tried\nto point out, browsers are <\/em>demanding thick-client applications requiring\nall<\/em> the capabilities of a modern computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Chromebooks are the spiritual descendants of NCs but they\u2019ve\nlearned the lesson, typically having decent processors and full-fledged OSs\nunderneath.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a word, Lotus wanted to use Java as a way to fight Microsoft on the office applications front. Basically, we wanted to contain <\/em>Microsoft: they could have the OS and the development tools on Intel PCs, but we wanted a cross-platform applications that ran on Windows and everywhere else — which we believed would be huge competitive advantage against Office. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To achieve that Lotus needed Sun to be a software development company, a supplier \u2013 ironically, to behave a lot like Microsoft’s developer team did with its independent software vendors (ISVs) in fact, with tools, documentation, and developer relations teams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sun (as best as I could tell) wanted to be Microsoft, and its leadership seemed to relish the idea of a war (the animosity between Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Bill Gates was palpable). Sun couldn’t care less about allies, as the silly little skirmish over naming proved. But it clearly didn\u2019t understand the types of applications we built, and certainly didn’t understand the expectations users had for their apps. Instead Sun changed course, focusing on the server with Java-based frameworks for server apps (the highly successful J2EE). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps somewhere along the line it made the business decision that it couldn\u2019t afford to compete on both server and client \u2013 I don\u2019t know. In any event the decline of the applet model opened the door to JavaScript, the dominant model today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, and tragically, Microsoft abandoned Visual J++ and its vastly better runtime. Why? Some say that Microsoft\u2019s version failed to pass Sun\u2019s compliance tests; others, that Microsoft refused Sun\u2019s onerous licensing demands. In any event, there was a lawsuit, Microsoft stopped work on J++ and some time later launched C#, a direct competitor to Java which has since surpassed it in popularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not to be outdone, Microsoft introduced its own components-in-browsers architecture, called ActiveX. Unlike Java, ActiveX did not use a byte-code approach nor did it employ the code-simulation security strategy that applets had. As a result, ActiveX’s, as they were called, performed much better than applets — but they only ran on Windows. But the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) ActiveX created around Java applets was profound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lotus\/IBM itself deprioritized its desktop application development in favor of Notes, which was believed to be a bigger growth market. Much as I admired Notes (I\u2019d worked on it as well) I didn\u2019t agree with the decision: Notes was expensive, it was a corporate sell, and had a long and often complicated sales cycle. I never believed we could \u201cwin\u201d (whatever that meant) against Microsoft with Notes alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was true that early on Exchange lagged behind Notes but\nit was also clear that Microsoft was laser-focused on Notes, so our advantage\ncould only be temporary. <\/p>\n\n\n\nBrowsers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Enter Your Hero<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Things Get Complicated<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.barrybriggs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/eSuite.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIBM<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Network Computer<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Lotusphere<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Bill and I<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Launch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.barrybriggs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/ibmebiz.gif\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.barrybriggs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/esuitelogo.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSo What Went Wrong?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Microsoft Got Java Right, None of the Others Did<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Security<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Network Computer was DOA<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Sun and Lotus Had Different Aspirations <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
ActiveX<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Lotus\u2019 Priorities Changed<\/h3>\n\n\n\n