The Nifty 50

I've been following this multi-blog conversation for the past few days and am a bit torn on it. While, I think there is value in putting together some out of the box "this is what Notes can do" applications. I think it is a colossal undertaking that if not organized properly would putter out and do more damage than good.

Anyway, while killing some time, I quite accidentally came across this quote from Ray Ozzie in an interview by Paul McNamara for NetworkWorld on December of 2004 for the 15th anniversary of Notes.

<quote>
Are there milestones through the early years of Notes that you thought particularly important to the development path?

The first big milestone -- and this is not specific to Notes but rather any major commercial end-user software product -- version 3.0 tends to be the first version that hits its mark because it's got a certain level of maturity, a certain level of user feedback plowed back into the product.

The next major milestone -- and this is not widely written about but I think customers understand it -- is there was a thing called "The Nifty 50." It was a set of application templates that were starter apps, so to speak, that were built on top of Notes 3. It bridged a lot of people into understanding and they just started to build more things.
</quote>

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2004/1202lotus.html

Take that and apply it to today's challenges facing Lotus Notes and Domino. Do we need to have an offering like the Nifty Fifty to help our customers understand where these products fit into today's collaborative-scape?

Answering just that question and ignoring the bullshit and politics, my answer is yes.