> I think it's important to start by saying that using Lotus Notes only as an email client misses the bigger picture
No, it's not important to start with that. I already mentioned I (we, I and a few consultants) were consulting at a client company. Sure, they may have missed some "bigger picture", but that's on them. For us, the picture they presented to us was our entire picture of Notes: It was the email client they (and therefore we, on their systems) used.
Likewise for all their own employees: apart from the CxOs or whoever made the decisions on what software to use, and the top echelons of the IT department that presumably advised them on this, the rest were all just corporate end users who got to accept what they were given. The ones we worked closely (as in sharing an office) with in their BI department certainly didn't have any influence on (or seem happy about) the selection of the software installed on their corporate Windows desktops. As far as they (and therefore we) were concerned, that was the whole picture, frame and all, period.
> Also, you didn't mention when you used it.
Indeed I did: I said I was there ~"for most of the 00s". I am getting old, but it wasn't the 19-00s; I'm not that old! And the 21-00s haven't arrived yet, so take a wild guess as to which 00s I may have meant...
But yes, I admit that isn't exceedingly exact -- mainly because my memory isn't, either. And it did, I must also confess, leave you to do a bit of deducive thinking: I also mentioned something about how the crappy interface may have been the main reason they switched to Outlook. It wasn't mentioned explicitly, but how would I have known that they switched, if I hadn't been there to experience the change? So it was only for about the first half of my time there. I worked for this client company -- as an employee of no less than three[1] consulting firms -- from 2001 to about 2009, so I suffered from Notes e-mail from 2001 to, say 2004 or -05. (Maybe even -06?) Full-time.
> As for the UI, the email client was highly configurable. Honestly, I don't remember ever thinking that something like Netscape Mail or The Bat looked or any email client that I tried at the time looked better.
No large corporation I know of used those. Outlook (or whatever any predecessors may have been called) all the way. So, totally irrelevant comparison.
> I didn't use Outlook back then, so I can't compare directly,
And it shows.
> but if Outlook over the past decade is any indication, Lotus Notes was at least on par, if not better that it.
Nope. You've got the timeline bass-ackwards: Never heard about "the continuing enshittification of Microsoft software" that all the kids are going on about nowadays?[2] That hip term means shit is getting worse. Which in turn -- put on that deductive deerstalker again, Sherlock! -- means it used to be better, in the before times. The UI of the Lotus Notes email client I used in a corporate environment 2001-ca2005 was utter unbearable crap compared to Outlook of the same era.
But, given how you seem unable to comprehend all this after I'd already said it all in my previous comment because of the huge blinders you've got permanently attached to your head, I see nothing useful coming from continuing this discussion.
The only things I'll leave for you to take away from it (although I doubt you will), are these:
*: It doesn't matter how great Notes was as an architecture or a development environment. That's not what end users see, and end users are what determine[3] a product's success in the market. And what I, as an end user, saw in ~2001-2005 was not only a mainframe-based architecture, but basically a mainframe-based user interface.
*: Sure, that interface may have been cleaned up at some time. Your linked picture certainly looks rather OK -- but that's nothing like what I saw and had to use. Dunno if that's because your pic is from some later version, or because the client corporation I worked at deliberately hadn't updated and was using some older version. But that doesn't much matter: Even if they were on some older version from, say, the late 1990s... Isn't that pretty typical for corporations, hanging back a version or two[4]? By that time the battle had long been lost. Microsoft had spent most of the 1980s and all of the 1990s in conquering the desktop market, and Outlook had looked something like your pic from... Idunno, at least about 1990? Catching up to 1990 table stakes sometime around 2000 won't help you leapfrog anything. And remember, this was, as mentioned above, well before the deliberate enshittification cycle we're currently in had begun. The 1990s and early 00 decade of this century may well have been the peak years of MS Office usability. No f***ing way Lotus Notes of the time (or from a corporate update cycle earlier) could compete with that.
*: So your "architecture / development argument is irrelevant, and your "the UI caught up!" one is missing the time factor; catching up to where your competitor was fiften years ago isn't really catching up.
There, sorry, that'll be all from me on this.
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[1]: I was employed at Oracle Finland from 2000 to 2005, at a small local outfit called ZenPark from 2005 to about 2007, when it got acquired by the much larger Finnish (briefly Scandinavian?) competitor Affecto, and therefore for Affecto (later swallowed up by CGI) from ~2007 to ~2010, when I left. That client gig had finally come to an end a year or two earlier, and the later ones I got were even less fun. The ZP-Affecto transfer was par for the course, with the acquisition, but the real miracle was Oracle allowing a colleague of mine, who transferred to ZP a while before me, to take his part of the gig with him. His precedent made it a cinch for me to follow in his footsteps.
[2]: Good morning, kids, welcome to the party... A decade or two too late, but nice of you to show up.
[3]: Sure, for corporate products it's often not actually end users' experience of actually using the product, but top management being bamboozled by marketing. But even C-suite managers use e-mail, so in this case they're end users too.
[4]: Well, at least it used to be. It's only sometime long after the turn of the century that the big software companies have to some extent succeeded in dragging corporate IT environments with them into the auto-updating software cycle that consumers have been stuck in for a long while already.