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LotusNotes

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Re: LotusNotes

#31

Post by EagnaIonat »

somat wrote: post #25
EagnaIonat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time. Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.

I don't entirely buy it, If true that should have killed the web, perhaps the web survived because it was not a product.

There were UX horror stories on the web as well. I guess it is the physical connection of having to start up your Notes application in work and being forced to use poorly designed apps.

Re: LotusNotes

#32

Post by topspin »

GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

> Lotus Notes died because the web took over

Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.

I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.

[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.

Re: LotusNotes

#33

Post by andrewstuart »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #28
andrewstuart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were many reasons Notes died. It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export. Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems. It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox. Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes. Th…

I'm curious about this part: "The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too." IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?

Well I suppose the whole thing was a dead end.

Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.

Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.

Re: LotusNotes

#35

Post by wolvoleo »

topspin wrote: post #32
GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

> Lotus Notes died because the web took over Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today. I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on ne…

M365 is proprietary and it is widely used by companies

Re: LotusNotes

#36

Post by zaphod_b »

> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.

IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.

Re: LotusNotes

#37

Post by cake-rusk »

cake-rusk wrote: post #6

It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...

Here's a quote from the article. Hopefully this helps the people with rose tinted glasses get some perspective...

>Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?

Re: LotusNotes

#39

Post by chris_wot »

wolvoleo wrote: post #35
topspin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lotus Notes died because the web took over Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today. I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on ne…

M365 is proprietary and it is widely used by companies

It’s all that survived.
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