Lotus: Farewell to a Once-Great Tech Brand
techland.time.com
techland.time.com
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.
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.
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.
I think the clunkiness, the slowness, the instability, are objectively bad traits of Notes no matter your background.
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
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.
(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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
But that was like 6 or 7 years ago. Wouldn't want to develop in Lotus Notes anymore, but I don't have any bad memories of the software.
Never really used the email functions though.
* 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.
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
Innovations on the spreadsheet have regularly failed to catch on. Improv is one. And I learned the other day that Resolver One has been discontinued.
More information on Improv:
• working Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
• sales video showing Improv’s features: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYsZmhnXR4
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.
You can view a sample Quantrix model on the web: http://publish.quantrix.com:8080/qloudserver/QuantrixViewer..... Try dragging around the Year and Item categories at the right and bottom to see the repivoting.
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 ;<).
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.
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.
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.
Check out http://www.lotusmuseum.com/
Love the error messages: http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx70.html
(Though they're probably on their way out too.)
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.
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.
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.