Steve Gillmor thinks LotUs, newly acquired by IBM, bootstrapped some Big Blue Web server code to bolt on the Lotus Notes Domino extensions - a [URL]-addressable Web standards approach to the Notes object store. At the time, Lotus (and Microsoft) felt the core Notes value proposition lay in its replication technology. In retrospect, Lotus may have been protecting the wrong crown jewels. The Notes single Data Store is the singular innovation: an unstructured database upon which mail, calendaring and scheduling, and line-of-business applications could be constructed, layered, and linked. (It was also really slow, with a development API that wasn't Loosely Coupled.) (Semi Structured Data)

And Jon Udell notes In retrospect it's clear to me that for all its prescience, Notes could not single-handedly move the discipline of data management three decades forward. That's how long I figure it will take - from twenty years ago to ten years from now - for SQL's table-oriented and XML's document-oriented styles to merge into a unified discipline.

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