The Rise and Fall of Lotus Notes: History, Features, and Legacy
Lotus Notes, launched in 1989 from a university project, pioneered client‑server groupware with email, calendar, encryption and a programmable low‑code platform, surged after IBM’s 1995 acquisition, but lost market share to web‑based rivals and costly, clunky design, eventually being sold to HCL in 2018 as a legacy cloud‑native solution.