News.com has a column by Ray Ozzie to mark 20 years of Lotus Notes:
The virtual office will shape our concept of the workplace. The new concept: a world of pervasive knowledge work, riding on the foundations of fiber laid by the ghosts of an Internet bubble past and enabled by cheap, self-service communications tools and technologies.
We’re only at the very beginning of exploring what can be done in the realm of using technology to enable joint work. How will Verizon’s fiber-to-the-home change the nature of how we work? As terabyte disks appear in our PCs and gadgets, how will we use the storage?
New concepts appear almost daily, emerging from both the distant parallel universes of paper-bound corporate or academic research and the “just try it and see what sticks” petri dish that is today’s Internet ecosystem. Those universes have brought us the likes of ICQ, Skype, Blogger, Wikipedia and Flickr.
In the 20 years since the beginning of this journey, I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen and to have played a small role in some incredible transformations. The nature of the corporation, of business, government, work, society and our own interpersonal relationships has changed–fueled by technology that’s still so very clearly in its infancy.
