Lotus Notes and Domino 8 now widely available

If your shop hasn’t been supporting the latest beta version of Lotus collaboration software, it might now. IBM announced today that Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8 [LD8] are now generally available. According to the press release, two years of development and testing, a considerable amount done in the field by actual businesses, went into LD8. I’m purely speculating here (not to mention my penchant for conspiracy theory), but with all that R and D across the pool of users, no doubt running a variety of platforms, will IBM look to end support on System i if license subscriptions go up elsewhere? How much of the R and D was testing for reliability on other platforms?