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I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time. I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though. Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" which isn't feature complete is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems.
Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room. Same thing with Google Wave, really.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time. I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though. Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" which isn't feature complete is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI. https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust