A senior VP at Lotus has torn into Microsoft for its strategy on email clients. Cliff Reeves, VP of Lotus' communications products, was speaking at the launch of version 5.0 of Notes on a boat called The Silver Barracuda moored on the river Thames. He said Lotus had now re-named Notes SUPER.HUMAN.SOFTWARE as part of a $100 million re-brand of the product. Lotus is not a company which takes its end users prisoner in terms of legacy support, said Reeves. But Microsoft is. Inflicting collateral damage on Netscape in the process, Reeves said: "Microsoft is the worst offender in ripping and replacing [email clients]." Documents provided by Lotus-IBM claimed that Windows 2000 would obsolete previous email clients. "Microsoft Mail was a dead end for Microsoft and they moved to Exchange. They said 'there are no choices'. We [Lotus] didn't do that. We maintained support for cc:Mail long beyond the industry said we should. "When we did, we gave them [customers] a great deal of warning and financial incentives to move. When you install a Domino server it will actively detect cc:Mail. "We don't see our customers as catives. Microsoft gets a tad arrogant with some of their users." Reeves said code for R5 was now gold and boxed product will ship within a month. ®