Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early | Hacker News Reader

Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early

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40 pointsmaguay31 comments

I worked on both Lotus Notes and Groove. What's great about Ray is that he has the capacity and drive to be involved in every part of the project. He drove high-level business requirements and wrote code and also cared about icons and colors. But he did it all without arrogance and allowed his team to argue back when necessary.

In case anyone is interested, a while back I wrote about another Ray Ozzie project: Live Mesh: https://gridwhale.medium.com/live-mesh-and-the-future-of-com...

Thank you for that story and thank you for your contribution. I remember Live Mesh vividly and admit I found parts of it awkward. The functionality I used the most and thought was far ahead of its time was the ability to use Remote Desktop with any computer in the mesh. I often controlled my home computer from work.

While it was technically possible to use a dynamic dns + insecurely forward the RDP ports, LM mostly just worked(tm). It's possible to do this today as securely with something like Tailscale but Live Mesh included all of the batteries and none of the headache. RIP Live Mesh. Thanks again

I appreciate this--thanks!

Yes, I think the Tailscale-style connectivity was a big benefit of Live Mesh; I wish we had pushed it further.

Live Mesh also didn't require you to sync everything to the cloud, in contrast to offerings today. The cloud was just another optional target.

Edit: the best replacement I could find that still exists is "Resilio Sync"

I was an early adopter of Live Mesh, and thought it was awesome. From the outside, it was mind-boggling that it didn’t gain traction.

You write about it as an idea that has been abandoned, but I think really it is an idea that has become distributed over other systems. iCloud Photos works essentially the same way Live Mesh implemented it. Apps use iCloud as a storage medium with built in backup and sync. Apps are collaborative by default now.

But I suppose I only had my own vision of the product as a user, maybe your aspirations go further.

You're absolutely right that all apps have evolved in the same direction, not necessarily because they were inspired by Live Mesh, but mostly because it's a pretty obvious/useful direction.

I think Live Mesh wanted to be the platform piece of that so that (e.g.,) iCloud Photos wouldn't have to implement that themselves. Moreover, it would allow users to have a unified management of the distributed system instead of dealing with each app separately. That's the part I miss.

This was an enjoyable read. Especially the idea of someone living and creating between eras resonates with me.

I've seen and played with Lotus but I'm too young to have worked in any environment where it was the primary communication tool.

Still, my take away from OP is that Ozzied strived for Lotus to be much more than an email client.

Lotus makes much more sense as an attempt to bring the collaborative features of a shared university computer system with email, chat, forums, shared documents and applications to an ordinary networked PC like environment.

Something bigger than a weird email client.

Lotus Notes was too big, too self-contained, and too weird to be "Something bigger than a weird email client." One facet of being too self-contained was that it had its own user interface paradigm, which was different from the operating systems it ran on. In other words the product decisions that would've made sense in an IDE or maybe a CAD system were bad product management decisions for a groupware product. Notes also had its own self-contained application development language and runtime. That is reminiscent of 4GLs. Remember 4GLs?

Maybe there is a parallel reality where groupware is as important as web browsers, but not in this universe.

That just feels like an extension of how things used to be done back then, especially on DOS. Making a recipe app? A bookkeeping app? A paint program? Well, you start by making a UI library first, and the product stuff got done eventually.

Then there was a transitionary period where common UIs were available, but not that great and individual shops could still easily create better experiences on their own. See eg Winamp. But eventually shared UI stacks got better and doing your own thing became a bad experience, see eg the Java UI libraries.

Yes, and for the last decade the circle has been closing. Native widgets and a common UI language are dying. Every app seems to start by collecting a hodepodge of "components" glued together half-heartedly by utility CSS classes.

I don’t know about this. If you were doing a recipe app on DOS likely you were using dBase or a clone of it and all those apps looked the same because of the character based limitations of the PC. Borland environments were similar.

Macintosh was a thing at the time, and Steve Jobs was preaching desktop metaphor orthodoxy in his church. Most apps at least tried.

>>Maybe there is a parallel reality where groupware is as important as web browsers, but not in this universe.

Yes, it was called the 1990s.

Notes was very much a product of Lotus Development, a weird enclave that was nominally IBM but that made absolutely certain you knew that they were not IBM, a bunch of very booksmart people with very little street smarts and strong opinions on how things should work, leading to software that was full of super-clever hacks, starting with the batshit crazy login prompt (you'll know what I'm talking about if you've used it) and going downhill from there. And since all the focus was on adding super-clever features no-one ever paid much attention to the boring stuff like making it work reliably.

For former Notes users, there's https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/misc/notespotting.pdf to remind you what you left behind.

I'm guessing you are writing about Notes.

Lotus was the name of the company that initially made the 1-2-3 spreadsheet.

Yes, Notes, sorry, totally forgot about 1-2-3.

Ray was, and probably stille is, a great architect and programmer.

He made us younger Microsoft employees feel like there was room for technical people in the top of the company.

Microsoft was actually always good at that. They know how to treat their people right

This really stood out to me:

> products like Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, they enabled the domain practitioner to potentially solve problems themselves. They’re democratized problem solving. A real estate officer or a plumber can solve their needs without having to involve third parties and explain to them the need

That may be true for people who have the freedom of action to craft and use their own solutions. It reminds me of the explosion in domain apps unleashed by Visual Basic.

It is not true for your average office jockey or line employee stuck using some line of business apps, and where access to powerful tools is not allowed or is even banned. Billy in Accounts can't fire up Claude even if he wanted to, and running Ollama on his work machine is a fireable offense. IT control precisely what can run on their hardware, after all. So he won't ever be able to finally fix those TPS reports even if he is the one guy with the knowledge to do so.

I'm not arguing that this isn't sound IT policy, but I do expect a fair bit of shadow IT to spring up when people internalize that keeping their job requires them to show massive AI powered productivity gains.

I still miss Groove.

So much this. It was a great piece of software that was once super useful to me... 'twas circa 2010. I was a wee project manager at a small marketing + design agency in Goa---emailing "big" files (via relatively anaemic broadband) was our bread and butter; raw images, multimedia, Adobe, Corel, MS Office stuff.

One day, I tried to demo Groove in our weekly company-wide morning show-and-tells.

I had a few of our "usual suspect" files synced between my laptop, and another computer upstairs. And then I tried to show how I was making edits on one computer, then (dramatically) running up to the other one, and doing something else, or undoing / overwriting the previous edit.

The magical-to-me seamless, and fast updates didn't make much of an impression on the crowd. Perhaps all the huffing and puffing was not the best look while trying to sell something that was supposed to make everyone's life easier :,)

Anyway, I kept using it and was so hopping mad when it got "embraced, absorbed, and extinguished". Software that "just works" and works really well is such a rare thing.

and now we have sharepoint.

I wonder if in the age of AI it's a lot easier to resurrect old software that we miss. Not easy, but a lot easier?

> Because polish is in the eye of the beholder

Polish is also a matter of taste and expertise.

And a lot of practice until you can say even the simplest things. And then you need to take night classes to be able to work with Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.

> And a lot of practice until you can say even the simplest things.

simplicity requires taste and effort.

As a Lisp-affine person, I could not agree more.

why is there no scroll bar in this article?

Author here, yikes, sorry about that. Going to go get that fixed.

Thank you!

Yes, horrible experience..

If you look at the right-hand side of your keyboard you'll see a key called "PgDn". You may use this to scroll through the article. Or, if you're using a fondle slab, just swipe to scroll.

You're welcome.

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