About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office.
The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.
Just as a counterpoint: when I interned at IBM, we were forced to use various Lotus products including Notes. Lotus Symphony was especially painful, and we begged to be allowed to just use Powerpoint (and were told, emphatically, "No.")
You might be thinking about the Office-like companion to Notes, Symphony. AFAIK (going from some Name/Location/BU-looking email addresses) IBM still uses Lotus Notes for email.
Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.
Notes is _terrible_ from a UI perspective. The server side (domino) though was light-years ahead of anything in terms of ideas at least. Combining a CA, distributed, document-oriented database(think mongodb, couchdb), LDAP server, web server and mail server that supports IMAP, POP, SMTP as well as the proprietary encrypted notes protocol.
Agreed. I worked in Lotus Domino for a short while, and it was absolutely amazing for Rapid Application Development of anything that required e-mail and storing documents (or kinda "schemaless" data). It was even supported multiple languages (a declarative "Formula" language, a Visual Basic derived "LotusScipt", and Java(!)).
You could write a decent Lotus Domino app that served up web pages, so users wouldn't have to use the awful Lotus Notes client.
Amusingly, in I think Lotus Notes 8, they revitalised the GUI by replacing it with... Eclipse RCP. Hrmm.
The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.