I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one internal app or a hundred.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room.
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" which isn't feature complete is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something.
I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one internal app or a hundred.
Our company has now migrated its Lotus applications to web applications written in Java, but it took us quite a few years.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room.
Same thing with Google Wave, really.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" which isn't feature complete is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
I think the point is that Microsoft struggles to hire developers with any knowledge of Windows programming.
This goes to my same complaint re: some Apple products. Some stuff is solved.
It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems.
Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
Lotus Notes was underrated imo.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something.
I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
And this isn't even the real cult PIM application from Lotus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://www.dreamingincode.com/
I really liked Lotus Notes.
Lotus is the best example of why you don't let IBM touch you.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
As written in the article, the UI sucked to many to us. Then our corporate migred to GMAIL and never looked back.
"Lotes" as we used to call it in my first job.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust