And the company had been headed ever more toward the telecommunications sector, especially with innovative products like Notes on its drawing boards.

But apparently its exciting promise will not be fulfilled.

Despite having said publicly that he would remain with the company, Mr Manzi has high-tailed it.

And that must surely lead to some question-marks about whether IBM can indeed keep the unique resource it has acquired in Lotus at arm's length and not squeeze the life out of it through sheer bureaucratic bullheadedness.

Locally, Lotus has played the story down. It said Mr Manzi had already completed the most important aspect of rolling out the joint IBM/Lotus product strategies, and that he had gained the important assurances from Big Blue that Lotus would indeed proceed at arm's length. (See story Page 7.) That may well be true. But one of the great things about all this new telecommunications technology to humble folk like me is that it really does put 'information at your fingertips'. Which means it is a very quick visit to the Lotus Web site to get a complete transcript of the joint press conference that IBM and Lotus held to announce their products integration strategies.

The press conference makes for some interesting hindsight reading. And both companies are adamant that the decisions made at that time on product integration are still the game plan.

You just can't help wondering about Jim Manzi's departure, though. Then again, maybe its just one of those things. Mr Manzi was not a big man, but he did have an enormous ego. So large, in fact, that maybe he simply didn't like not being the boss anymore.

Mr Manzi's replacements, named at the weekend as Michael Zisman and Jeffrey Papows who will form the newly-created office of the President of Lotus, have a tremendously important job in front of them.

Because nothing has changed. The potential synergies that exist between IBM's and Lotus product set are very powerful indeed.

The good news is that both men come from very senior positions with the communications business group at Lotus (that is, they come from Lotus, rather than being stuffed suits from IBM put in place 'to keep an eye on things').

If IBM can just leave 'em alone ...

SPEAKING of Lotus, the company exhibiting at the Olympiad of telecommunications events, Telecom 95 in Geneva, came away looking pretty good.

The company announced that it had garnered the support of 11 major carriers to offer its Lotus Notes software as a strategic platform for networked business applications on their data services networks. The carriers also committed to work toward inter-operating with each other and with the other announced Notes Public Networks carriers, AT&T and IBM.

In technical terms, the agreements potentially mean 'Big, Big, Bucks' to Lotus. The carriers in the agreement are no small potatoes: BT (formerly British Telecom), CompuServe, Deutsche Telekom, NT&T, NTT Data, SNET, Telstra, Telecom Italia, Telekom Malaysia, Unisource and US West.

Essentially the agreement means that the growing ranks of Notes users will be able to more quickly, easily and cheaply create notes applications across multiple geographies and via multiple carriers. It should ultimately mean a lot more Notes users because under the agreement the eleven carriers (to say nothing of IBM and AT&T) will use notes as a core technology product offering in telecommunication services.

Interestingly enough, Jim Manzi announced the new agreement and described it as 'a major milestone for Lotus, its customers and business partners'.

You have to wonder whether he knew then - just one week before he resigned - that he would soon be announcing another 'major milestone for Lotus, its customers and business partners ...'