Full Circle Associates

Ray Ozzie looks back at the launch of the company that created Lotus notes and forward to the future of online collaboration tools. Below are a few snippets. I have to admit, I enjoy these year end retrospectives. Lots of food for thought and fuel for 2005's imagination.

...Twenty years ago tomorrow, on Dec. 7, 1984, Mitch Kapor and I signed an agreement that began the development of a product code-named Notes.

...Fifteen years ago tomorrow, on Dec. 7, 1989, ... Lotus Notes Release 1.0 was born.

...The fundamental nature of the corporation was changing--catalyzed by a change in doctrine and deftly enabled by cheap commodity communications and information technology.

...By the late 1990s...business was changing--from vertically integrated powerhouses to a mesh of interdependent partners. The winners were companies that used information technology to create the most efficient and effective network of partners and suppliers.

...Peter Drucker projects the future of the corporation to be an extreme confederation of businesses--from the large to small to very small. These loosely knit confederations are held together by a common strategy--local economics--and a web of fine-grain alliances.

...The Wall Street Journal observed ...New jobs are being created, but they're in different organizational forms than the ones we're measuring ... more people, by choice or necessity, "become self-employed or form partnerships, rather than working for large corporations."

...the fundamental nature of work itself is changing--enabled by cheap, ubiquitous networking, communications, coordination and information-sharing technologies. The "virtual office" is more the norm than the exception.

... 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.

...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.