The architect of the era's defining collaboration software, known across two companies
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Ray Ozzie developed Lotus Notes — the defining collaboration platform of its era, and the system every asynchronous-collaboration architecture of the period, Consilient's included, was implicitly measured against — and later moved to Microsoft. Jonathan Hare knew him in both chapters. The record holds the relationship and invites his account; the architectural conversation between Notes' model and Sitelets' is a page waiting for his side of it.
Per S-112: met while he ran the Lotus Notes division and worked on Improv — a Mitch Kapor introduction, if the author recalls correctly, and the hedge is kept. All the cool technologists knew Ray Ozzie: brilliant and innovative. They met again in Redmond years later, just after Ozzie arrived as Microsoft's CTO — and he was an excellent champion. The email archive holds the era's threads; the search is queued.
Correction, 25 August 2026, published rather than silently applied: the recollection above — Lotus Notes era, a possible Kapor introduction — carried its own hedge, and the hedge did its job. The meeting was in the Groove Networks era: first at Groove's Massachusetts offices early on, then again at the O'Reilly P2P conference in February 2001, where both men were on the program — Ozzie on the keynote bill, documented in the archived conference announcement (S-119). His own published timeline (S-115) anchors the rest: Groove 1997–2005, acquired by Microsoft in April 2005 — which is precisely the 'just after he arrived' of the Redmond meeting — and Chief Software Architect from June 2006, the role inherited from Bill Gates, where his concept labs seeded what became Azure.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Building 1, 1991 — the nucleus, and where the coordination problem was named
Open →built Notes under the roof founded byKnown for years from Boston conferences and mutual friends; re-connected in the Berkeley neighborhood both companies shared
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-112The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-114The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-115The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-119The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →