Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
M365 is used only because it is the continuation of MS Office, which had been entrenched in most companies for many decades.
In the beginning, the fact that MS Office was proprietary had nothing to do with communication protocols, but only with the file formats.
The need to convert between proprietary file formats had always existed in an enterprise setting, which is why all such products, including MS Office, had extensive support for importing the file formats of their competitors, so this was never a serious obstacle for adoption.
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.