I interned at IBM/Lotus in 2006, when I was still in college. I don't know much about its history pre-Notes, which is mostly what the article is focused on. But I liked the place, and I appreciated my time there. It had a lot of history.
Notes is a fascinating example of the power and danger of a large legacy customer base. Their UI predated Windows, and any change they made risked to either the look and feel or the backend data model risked alienating their already dwindling list of customers, many of whom were looking for an excuse to leave anyway. Nonetheless, those users kept them afloat for years, and still do.
It's easy to forget that the power of the platform is not in the email, which sucked; it handled authentication, security, and replication for a wide array of largely drag-and-drop business applications. If you're an enterprise, and what you basically need to automate your workflow is a form and a little bit of glue code, there's a lot to be said for that system; old companies that claw their way out of it find themselves now saddled to shaky, expensive bespoke web applications that don't work offline. Because of this, it was a devil to migrate off of; even IBM tried, and failed, to rewrite it, in the form of Lotus Workplace. Talk about lock-in.
Lotus Notes is one of the worst, most agonizing pieces of software I have had to use.
When I read the headline, I had a glimpse of Hope that Lotus Notes might be discontinued, and that I may stop using that horrible, clunky, unstable, slow UI.
Depends. Coming from a different direction, meaning a non-MS world, I found Lotus really pleasant to work with and extremely powerfull. The DB-style of everything, the apps that you could embed into it made it very enterprise, for it could automatize a lot of the processes and internal flows.
Unfortunatelly, in a MS world domination for home computers, a new employee would find Lotus quite strange and unappealing. Sad.
PS. the article makes a mistake too, the full SmartSuite costs 342$ not just the 1-2-3.
on Notes for years, and never thought it lived up to the hallowed Lotus name. It was a fabulous product if you were an IT person, but so poorly designed from a productivity standpoint
It's amazing how far you can get by pleasing the IT people who as far as I can tell are the only group that's pleased with the current version of Notes.
My first experience with Lotus Notes was in 2005 and I found it to be a bloated piece of crap with archaic email rendering, barely functioning search, and long wait times for even basic operations. I was hoping to see news that IBM was sunsetting the entire product along with the Domino servers it runs on.
It's funny, because when I first encountered Notes way back when, it was something the department installed without IT approval. Semi-technical users could easily build little tracking and document databases and publish them on the network. People actually liked using it!
(I've always suspected that Gmail was inspired by the old Notes mail interface, which had no 'inbox' and was based on conversation views and tagging.)
Once Notes turned into IT-managed 'groupware' and became a bad parody of MS Outlook, it became completely intolerable. End-users could no longer create databases (or even edit their inbox columns) as most systems were completely locked-down. My last two encounters with it, they didn't even use the DB/workflow side of it, it was only for mail.
I've developed in Lotus Notes for about a year and I thought it was kind of interesting. The distributed databases were kinda cool, as was the Designer. Perhaps it reminded me a bit of HyperCard.
I used Notes and Domino in 97-98 and quite liked it. We used it to develop in-house workflow and documenting tools and at the time it was really quite slick. Doing web interfaces to the tools was amazingly quick (relative to most other things at the time) and generating custom spreadsheet reports was quite quick and easy assuming you where also using Lotus 1-2-3.
I think the Lotus Notes as a GUI platform is so horrid that it couldn't possibly be good at anything:
* It comes with a program "Zap Notes" which is supposed to kill it when it hangs (Wat?). A bit funny since "Zap Notes" doesn't even work for me, and I have to use a combination of greps and kills.
* The UI rendering is slow and visible. These guys haven't heard of double buffering. You see little GUI components being rendered slowly. This is extremely annoying and sluggish.
* Every little UI operation you do in this program can take seconds on relatively modern hardware. During these seconds, the UI is of course completely blocked.
* When someone at your corporate IT wants to move a Notes mail server or such -- they actually have to coordinate a reconfiguration of all the users' mail server addresses! You have to go dig in a huge, badly designed preferences dialog to make this change. This is nuts.
The list goes on and on, but I can't fathom anyone liking this software.
It has been disappointing IT people for a long time now as well. The eclipse based designer client in particular was a difficult transition. And the move to Java based Xpages hasn't been all sunshine and glory.
Damien Katz had said the document-like Lotus Notes db inspired him to create CouchDB.
He talked about this in a 2009 podcast:
"You can think of Damien Katz' CouchDB project as the distilled 'good stuff' from Lotus Notes. Wait! Why are you running away? Come back! It's not that bad! We swear!"
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4150.html
My favorite Lotus program was the revolutionary Improv <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv>. I'm sad that its user interface didn't catch on, although some parts of it are available in things like pivot tables (albeit clunkier to use in my opinion).
There is a modern equivalent to Improv called Quantrix Modeler (http://www.quantrix.com/Product_Editions.htm). It costs more than $1,500 – I haven’t found any good similar program with a consumer price level. But I’ve been trying out the free 30-day demo of Quantrix Modeler, and it seems pretty neat.
I fondly remember the first version of Lotus 123. Started out writing a simple macro and then entire programs automating the business where I was working.
The bosses thought it was magic. It was so much fun I'd regularly stay after work for hours sometimes. Then I discovered dBase II which allowed me to do even more ;<).
We have very similar histories. As an assistant manager at a Dominos I had the entire store's books ran on 123. It was an enchanted experience to take the drudgery of the daily, weekly, and monthly paperwork and make it all magic. Very good times.
I did that again with DBaseIII for a small trucking company. After a third time, I finally figured out that programming had selected me, whether I wanted it or not. It was just too cool (and lucrative) to turn down.
I felt that Lotus Notes was trying to do too many things when in reality most people were using it for email and calendaring.
The UI looked terrible and it was overall slow and crashed often. You had to manually kill the zombie process or else you would not be able to re-open Lotus Notes.
The only Lotus product I remember with affection is Agenda - which is still the best PIM I've ever used. I never understood why they stopped development on it, and I've never understood why someone hasn't developed a functional equivalent.
Lotus was one of the most successful start-ups ever under the visionary Mitch Kapor. Lotus came from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor
Mitch started all the projects that kept the company afloat for 15 years. My favorites were:
Notes, Magellan, Agenda, and Improv and internally used Orion (search tool).
Jim Manzi the Mckinsey consultant who took over from him successful acquired and killed about 10 good companies (Approach, cc:Mail, Amipro).
Lotus Notes was a very good workflow development tool that forced to support email to sell more copies. Most large companies still don't have cultures that support open sharing of information and use email as the defacto workflow tool.
Lotus Notes as an Email client sucks. And i am forced to use it in my company. I guess since i dont use it that way, Lotus Notes is a very powerful "platform", that allows you to create different things around it. Viewing as a application, it is just truly awful.
The best thing i have read is that Notes will have a plug in ( Why Plugin ? ) for browsers that allows you to fully access all of its functionality. I hope the mail part could be used from browser without the plugin. That way i no longer have to fire up the slow and bloated application for what i consider a simple task of emailing.
I used to do some development in Notes/Domino. Desperately uncool....
Although you could describe it as a fork of Apache, with a solid auth engine baked in, tightly coupled to a BTree-based NoSQL persistence engine and a scripting layer supporting Java or a dialect of VBScript. Released in the late 90's....
So perhaps hipsters would say it was ahead of its time... :-P
IIRC big blue's software group are slowly trying to blur the lines between their various brands in order to seem more integrated and go back to just being IBM software.
Ex-Lotii here. I joined in '93 supporting 1-2-3 for Dos, 1-2-3 for Windows and Lotus Approach.
I also taught myself Notes while I was there.
Notes looks kind of weird now, but pre-internet days it was the only real way to create an "intranet", and it's workflow capabilities were pretty cool.
Good old Lotus 1-2-3. Brings back memories and a few horror stories. I remember Word Star from that era too. And dBase. Those 3 apps were in every office in New York.
Notes is a fascinating example of the power and danger of a large legacy customer base. Their UI predated Windows, and any change they made risked to either the look and feel or the backend data model risked alienating their already dwindling list of customers, many of whom were looking for an excuse to leave anyway. Nonetheless, those users kept them afloat for years, and still do.
It's easy to forget that the power of the platform is not in the email, which sucked; it handled authentication, security, and replication for a wide array of largely drag-and-drop business applications. If you're an enterprise, and what you basically need to automate your workflow is a form and a little bit of glue code, there's a lot to be said for that system; old companies that claw their way out of it find themselves now saddled to shaky, expensive bespoke web applications that don't work offline. Because of this, it was a devil to migrate off of; even IBM tried, and failed, to rewrite it, in the form of Lotus Workplace. Talk about lock-in.
Still, I'll miss the name.