And so the Lotus brand goes into the deep dark night... Goodbye Lotus, goodbye...

eWeek - IBM Drops Lotus Brand, Takes Notes and Domino Forward

"IBM has dropped the Lotus brand from its collaboration software products as it prepares to release a new version of Notes and Domino.In a move that has been a long time in the making, IBM is dropping the Lotus brand and moving forward with the IBM brand, only to identify products like Notes and Domino.

IBM plans to deliver a public beta of IBM Notes/Domino 9.0 Social Edition that will not carry the Lotus brand, Ed Brill, director of social business and collaboration solutions at IBM, wrote in a Nov. 13 blog post. "…This beta is also the point where Notes/Domino will join other IBM software solutions in sporting only the IBM brand—the second-most-valuable brand in the world," Brill said in his post.

IBM's dropping the Lotus brand might be viewed as a historic moment for old-timers, but also as a business-as-usual move by an industry giant. Lotus has been around since 1982, initially as the Massachusetts-based Lotus Development Corp., which released its famed Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet in 1983. IBM acquired Lotus in 1995 for $3.5 billion, primarily to get hold of Lotus Notes, then a wildly popular groupware system developed by Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates that was eating into IBM's profits.

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Goodbye and goodnight "Lotus"... [Insert 'Feeling old statement here'] [Insert 'Wonder how many people today even remember the Lotus name' statement here] [Insert 'I wonder how many people still have Lotus 123 installed' question here (No, I don't, but I think I've got the bits somewhere... ;)]