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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

>>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.

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