I interned at IBM/Lotus in 2006, when I was still in college. I don't know much about its history pre-Notes, which is mostly what the article is focused on. But I liked the place, and I appreciated my time there. It had a lot of history.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Still, I'll miss the name.
Excerpt:<p><pre><code> 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
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It's amazing how far you can get by pleasing the IT people who as far as I can tell are the only group that's pleased with the current version of Notes.<p>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.
Damien Katz had said the document-like Lotus Notes db inspired him to create CouchDB.<p>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!"
<a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4150.html" rel="nofollow">http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4150.html</a>
My favorite Lotus program was the revolutionary Improv <<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv>" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv></a>. I'm sad that its user interface didn't catch on, although some parts of it are available in things like pivot tables (albeit clunkier to use in my opinion).
I fondly remember the first version of Lotus 123. Started out writing a simple macro and then entire programs automating the business where I was working.<p>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 felt that Lotus Notes was trying to do too many things when in reality most people were using it for email and calendaring.<p>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.
The only Lotus product I remember with affection is Agenda - which is still the best PIM I've ever used. I never understood why they stopped development on it, and I've never understood why someone hasn't developed a functional equivalent.
Lotus was one of the most successful start-ups ever under the visionary Mitch Kapor. Lotus came from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor</a><p>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).<p>Jim Manzi the Mckinsey consultant who took over from him successful acquired and killed about 10 good companies (Approach, cc:Mail, Amipro).<p>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.<p>Check out <a href="http://www.lotusmuseum.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lotusmuseum.com/</a>
To this date, one of my favorite sites out there is the Lotus Notes sucks site: <a href="http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/</a><p>Love the error messages: <a href="http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx70.html" rel="nofollow">http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx70.html</a>
Lotus Notes as an Email client sucks. And i am forced to use it in my company. I guess since i dont use it that way, Lotus Notes is a very powerful "platform", that allows you to create different things around it. Viewing as a application, it is just truly awful.<p>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.
I used to do some development in Notes/Domino. Desperately uncool....<p>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....<p>So perhaps hipsters would say it was ahead of its time... :-P
Ex-Lotii here. I joined in '93 supporting 1-2-3 for Dos, 1-2-3 for Windows and Lotus Approach.<p>I also taught myself Notes while I was there.<p>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.
Good old Lotus 1-2-3. Brings back memories and a few horror stories. I remember Word Star from that era too. And dBase. Those 3 apps were in every office in New York.