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Comment by refset | Hacker News Reader

While trying to recall the relationship between Lotus Notes and Lotus Agenda ("which came first?" etc.) I just dug up this[0] comment from a different Notes-related HN discussion a few months ago that also mentions 'Chandler'[1] - an OSS implementation written in Python:

> [Chandler] is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called Lotus Agenda, notable because of its "free-form" approach to information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 / "For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

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The millions invested in P2P OSAF/Chandler indirectly shipped a great book :) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/ & https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/

There was also the Groove Networks desktop client from Ray Ozzie, a Chandler-esque P2P successor to Lotus Notes, acquired by Microsoft, https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-ray-ozzie-talk... & https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/22104480/crn-interv...

> Groove File Sharing.. projects the concept of sharing and synchronization and conversation directly into Windows Explorer so every Windows folder now has a Groove button in it and if you press it, you turn that folder into a workspace that shares that folder with other people inside or outside the company, puts red marks on files, lets you have chats and conversations privately within that folder, it projects all the platform capabilities of Groove right into the file system. It lets people share folders across all their computers, whether at home or at work..

I remember doing realtime collaboration in Groove in the early 2000s, and it was magical — this was doing what Google Docs, Figma etc. only accomplished much, much later.

Unfortunately, Groove was also obviously too much of a toy app back then. The whiteboard app was too simple, the word processor was too simple, and so on. It was an office suite but it could do almost nothing. The vision was extremely impressive, but the apps never evolved to compete with real office apps.

Another product that was way ahead of its time and failed in spite of it, or because of it.

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