Lotus Notes was a very imaginative product. I used it for a while at a couple of clients while I was consulting. One application was to build a moderately sophisticated document tracking workflow process. The other was to build various small databases for status reports and project status applications.

It was exceedingly simple to build simple network-based applications that would pretty much instantly replicate to wherever you wanted it. The applications were not very pretty, and all had a similar look and feel. It was extremely imaginative. I remember Bill Gates even back then, while taking a jibe at Ozzie for putting an OS in the product, said that he was one of the smartest programmers out there.

The web kind of changed everyone's way of thinking about that sort of stuff, and Notes kind of faded.

I am not quite sure what being anti-web means. If web means nice GUI brower stuff, then maybe, but if you think of web as being protocols with clients and servers, then I wouldn't agree.