Jeff Papows

CEO of Lotus Development, has been warning in speeches for some time that corporate information technology officials won't stand still for the Internet culture of daily software revision.

"There's a lot of hype around the notion of free source. There's not a whole lot of incremental value that's obvious to me when we're dealing with mission-critical systems," he says.

Papows also says the free source movement is part of the same model of software development. "Netscape has tried to reinvigorate this model around the notion of free client software and Internet-dispersed source code. That is a recipe for a lot of risk in the development cycle that isn't going to benefit the users."

Mitch Kapor has called for Internet applications that do more than e-mail and Web page displays. Papows says Lotus Development, among other firms, is trying to move the Internet toward "market-facing systems, or interactive, more dynamic, knowledge-based applications that facilitate collaboration. "That's a much more exciting, a much higher-return equation than the static publishing models," he says.

Paul Schindler talks with Lotus CEO Jeff Papows.

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Job
President and CEO of Lotus Development since October 1996

Responsible For
Lotus' financial and operational performance and execution of overall strategy

Career
Formerly president and CEO of Cognos; also worked at Cullinet Software, Software International, and Para Research.

Education
B.A. in biology and secondary education from Norwich University; M.A. in human resource management from Pepperdine University; Ph.D from California Coast University.

Papows On Free Source
"There's a lot of hype around the notion of free source. There's not a whole lot of incremental value that's obvious to me when we're dealing with mission-critical systems."

Papows On The Internet
"The Internet is one of the few pieces of the information technology infrastructure that has been concurrently over-hyped and under-valued."