Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch • Hacker News Board

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#31

Post by steveBK123 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:24 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #29

cube00 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the point is that Microsoft struggles to hire developers with any knowledge of Windows programming.

This is a problem that one of the richest 10 companies in the world should be able to solve with time & money.

Simply making your product worse is not normally a solution outside monopolies.. ah, I see.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#32

Post by m_mueller » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:24 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #17

GrumpyGoblin wrote: post #5

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 think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…

the Eclipse version still had the old DLLs underneath with just a rather superficial Java layer put on top. JVM wrapping compiled C code, yay....

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#33

Post by alexpotato » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax.

The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand new market that had never existed before.

This led to the price for a movie on VHS/Beta ranging from $10 to over $100 because no one knew what the actual demand curve looked like.

I feel like the 1990s was a lot like this but with UI/UX. People had opinions on what consumers wanted but the market was expanding so quickly that no one knew for sure. Firms just tried things and, in hindsight, some firms seemed "smarter" because they picked the feature set that customers ended up liking.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#34

Post by ubermonkey » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

maguay wrote: post #23

GrumpyGoblin wrote: post #5

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?

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, an…

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#35

Post by mkovach » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:55 PM UTC

I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs.

Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.

Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.

But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#36

Post by austin-cheney » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:55 PM UTC

ubermonkey wrote: post #34

maguay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, an…

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

SMTP is not a user interface. It’s just text from RFC821/822

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#37

Post by busywaiting » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

GrumpyGoblin wrote: post #5

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?

Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.

This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#38

Post by baggachipz » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish).

The paradigm of everything being a database with documents was ahead of its time, but the real power was in LotusScript. It was basically just Javascript and that allowed me to transition to a web dev role later on. I have mostly fond memories of Notes.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#39

Post by jklowden » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

ubermonkey wrote: post #34

maguay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, an…

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.

That and, you know, Microsoft.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#40

Post by fg137 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.”

I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.

This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.

This article just reads weird to me.