Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

The issue with Lotus Notes is that there was too much low-level machinery exposed directly to the client, and things you would expect to work with a basic email client, like .ics invites, simply never works right. There was no good dev environment for it, and most of the "develop your own app" feature was locked by corporate policy anyways so we pretty much had the worst of both worlds.

All in all, not something I would recommend to actually use, the only thing it really helped me see is that OneNote's lineage from Lotus Note as I think a lot of the original Lotus Note devs jumped to Microsoft at the time.

I was briefly what is now called a developer-in-test on Sametime after Lotus Development bought them. I was untrained in C++ so my bug reports for that API were frequently closed with the comment "No".

You mark the database as read only, copy the .nsf file over, unmark the database as read only, done. Brightstor had a plugin for Notes that did that automatically and could do incremental backups with ease.

Move to Exchange and it's horrible single file mail storage solution which was inconceivable when hard drives weren't that big. 10,000 users? It's 100MB of mail so it can fit nicely in a single storage volume. Backups? Well, only at night because you have to unmount the file from Exchange, copy it over, and mount it again, which took a good couple of hours.

I miss Notes "simplicity".

We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.

The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.

My reasoning (which I ranted on extensively for the rest of the interview) was that mandating Lotus Notes as a tool internally, let alone continuing to sell it, reflected very poorly on how IBM felt about their employees, customers, and products. Examples:

* for YEARS IBM had to ship a "killnotes.exe" utility to their own employees because they couldn't figure out how to gracefully exit the app - and that's just one papercut out of hundreds;

* they misrepresented the popularity of the product, as the number of seats sold was tied to other bundled deals - most customers wouldn't touch the product;

* they continually gaslit employees and customers that Notes was great for common workflows (email in particular, searching in general) where in fact it was overwhelmingly a failure - and anyone who complained "didn't understand the product";

* they would send out multiple-choice surveys on "How would you like to improve Notes?" with every question and possible answer tied to developer-focused and database features with nothing allowing feedback on the primary use-cases that were driving users up the wall

In the end IBM's stance on Notes was either tone-deaf, incompetent, mendacious, malicious, opportunistic, extractive, callous, or shameless with no sense of pride in product.

I'm still bitter. Man, I hated that product.