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Hear hear. The Notes adoption curve he points to can be explained by other factors -- marketing, bundling, competition (or lack of it), etc.
ok, let's hear your explanation then. Notes was pretty advanced for its day and big companies bought it because it actually did what it was supposed to do.
The message that I took away from this article was that good software has to deal with the likely exceptions it will run into in the real world, using real world data. When I built the first version of the Ambient Clock ( http://ambientclock.com ), I groveled through the vagaries of iCal implementations. It was a nightmare. I breathed a sigh of relief when we decided to use GData: a nice, clean API. But what bit me n…
Also, if he really wanted to prove his point he could have pointed out that the development could be traced back to the early 70s when Ray Ozzie was working on PLATO
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I read an interview with an IBM technical guy once who claimed that Lotus Notes was first and foremost a synchronization platform (desktop and server) and email was just kind of built on top of that..
Well synchronization is still a big pain (Exchange server, anyone?) so if that's the problem they solved, then they deserved success.
"During this time, the developers at Iris used Lotus Notes to communicate remotely with people at Lotus. Halvorsen said, "Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality." For example, the developers needed to synchronize data between the two different locations, so they invented replication. "This wasn't in the original plan, but the problem arose and we solved it," said Halvorsen."
From IBM's "The History of Notes and Domino" http://tinyurl.com/2b8wxk
"Inside Notes provides a single place where you can quickly learn about the architecture of Notes" http://tinyurl.com/ytjkf3 [PDF]
Note: I love how IBM's web site uses the famed Notes Icon as it's little Website icon identifier :)
Not all software will make it that soon. Some will make it more quickly. Some will never make it at all.
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Well synchronization is still a big pain (Exchange server, anyone?) so if that's the problem they solved, then they deserved success.
"The product was very far ahead of its time. It was the first commercial client/server product." "During this time, the developers at Iris used Lotus Notes to communicate remotely with people at Lotus. Halvorsen said, "Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality." For example, the developers needed to synchronize data between the two different locations, so they invented replication. "This…
Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality.
The feedback loop of eating your own dog food is one of the greatest benefits a software project can have. Here the programmers weren't only users of the product, they were using it as an essential part of the development work itself. That's like putting steroids into your dog food and then eating it.
sry joels, doncha know that the singularity is near?
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I haven't met someone who doesn't hate it. I certainly have. And it led me to a little theory: that Lotus Notes' value was in enabling non-programmers to build a certain class of apps. If this is correct, then its value was pretty big (think of spreadsheets). It also explains why programmers hate Lotus Notes so much; systems built this way get messy very quickly (again, think of spreadsheets). But to dismiss the valu…
I read an interview with an IBM technical guy once who claimed that Lotus Notes was first and foremost a synchronization platform (desktop and server) and email was just kind of built on top of that..
Usually when someone has a bad opinion of Notes/Domino it's because he used an old version of the e-mail application at some previous company, and it did have a sucky user interface. But the current version is on par with anything else out there.