It’s not often I shed a tear regards things I’ve done in the past but now and again I think a bit of nostalgia is good for the soul. Carl Tyler has noticed that IBM have announced the untimely demise of the Lotus Discovery Server which IMHO was one of the cleverest bits of software Lotus every dreamt up. Yes that includes Notes/Domino on which ironically it was based. What drew me to LDS was that at long last here was a piece of software that tried to bridge the gap between what software developers think technology should do and what human beings would often like software to do. Namely help them find people and things inside their organisation. But like all great ideas it was by nature a very ‘disruptive’ piece of technology and had a cultural dimension many people didn’t understand. Sadly they mainly worked for IBM so resources for LDS were small, inconsistent and it never had the investment to take it past the notion of “Oh….that’s a clever idea!” It’s not often you can say this but it was really was, and still is, an idea way ahead of it’s time.