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Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

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Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#91

Post by cube00 »

m_mueller wrote: post #32
rsynnott wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Always fun when NLNOTES crashed but the Eclipse wrapper kept running so things like tabs still worked but couldn't show any Notes tabs however web based tabs kept working.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#92

Post by flymasterv »

rwmj wrote: post #28
flymasterv wrote: post #20

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.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/

Huh. I somehow missed that 24 years ago. Joel’s right.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#93

Post by YesThatTom2 »

Don’t forget about Lotus Network Notes!

It was one of AT&T’s attempts to “kill the internet”.

The people working on it were down the hall from me when I was at AT&T.

It only worked on Novell networking. I asked how they plan on dealing with various Novell limits and they’d respond with blank stares.

The plan was to restrict it to only work on AT&T networks. So, it was more of a marketing ploy than a technology.

When I’d ask “how could this little project beat the internet, which is huge and growing exponentially?” And was told basically they believed if they could act fast enough, nobody would know the internet existed.

And people wonder why I had no faith in AT&T management.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/at-t-dumps-n...

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#94

Post by d_silin »

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.

Why don't they use their AI solutions for software development?

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#95

Post by GMoromisato »

I was a developer on versions 2 through 4.5. I agree with the main point of the article: Lotus Notes was breaking new ground, and we sometimes landed on suboptimal designs because we didn't have a prior example.

And once we had a design that the current userbase was used to, we couldn't change it easily even if the rest of the industry standardized on a different pattern.

But Lotus Notes's main strength--everything is a database, even email--was also its biggest UX weakness. The "email app" in Notes was built in the same low-code environment customers used to build custom apps. That was good because email got features like encryption and replication for free, but it was bad because we couldn't easily customize the UI to optimize email. Instead, we had to add general-purpose UI features to the platform and then use them in the email app. But that was more work and took longer. Outlook could improve faster.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#96

Post by GMoromisato »

shadowtree wrote: post #80
fg137 wrote: post #40

> “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 wron…

It was an era when Windows had near total Desktop market share in businesses - and Notes violated all Windows UI conventions. Enter MS Office (pre-ribbon) and LN was toast. MSFT was so dominant back then that Gates had to rescue Apple to keep up the appearance of a fair market!

Lotus 1-2-3, et al, were killed by MS Office. But Lotus Notes was still selling 20+ million seats a year in 2000.

The web killed Notes, not Microsoft.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#97

Post by GMoromisato »

flymasterv wrote: post #20

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.

Those were the days! Send me an email--I'd love to reconnect!

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#98

Post by shadowtree »

tomfakes wrote: post #87
shadowtree wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Notes user (email, cal, plus apps for expense tracking, etc) - what did Notes in was the horrendous, non-Windows user interface. The second half of the article here is spot on, if anyone bothers to read it. Nice to see those old site ridiculing Notes, Jeff Atwood et al - a blast from the past! As an end-user, I welcomed Notes demise. And don't get me started on its god-awful local/offline sync behavior. O…

I was part of the small team that added Exchange Offline mode very, very late in the product cycle specifically to counter the Notes Local Replication story. 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.

Kudos, as an owner of an offline/sync stack myself - this stuff is so hard at scale. You guys did a great job!

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#99

Post by flymasterv »

GMoromisato wrote: post #97
flymasterv wrote: post #20

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.

Those were the days! Send me an email--I'd love to reconnect!

I was a summer intern for about 3 months. All I really remember was lunch on the Groof and my first experience with Free Tech Soda. I handled a lot of the i18n on the demo stuff, like the chess game.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#100

Post by logans_gun »

jjkaczor wrote: post #50

My first exposure to Lotus Notes was to work on a migration project that was moving from Notes to "Exchange WebStorage System" (WebDAV) - which was an aborted "go-nowhere" server/service which ended-up being replaced by SharePoint ("Teams Services") - which we had to also re-target mid-project. We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate, a small team and an extremely limited time. (and…

Ever since I moved infra to Linux I’m glad I don’t have to remember to uninstall WebDAV. FUCK!
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