Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

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.

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.

Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one custom app or a hundred.

Same thing with Google Wave, really.

It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.

I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.

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.

I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.

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.

We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.

   a. Everything you think is new was created in the 1960s by Don
      Bitzer @ UIUC or Doug Engelbart @ SRI.  (and probably also
      Robert Creasy @ IBM.)

   b. Lotus Notes (and Groove) were products, not protocols.  If
      you wanted to use them, you used Windows and the server and
      client from the vendor.

   c. Lotus Notes only sort of worked over the intarwebs.  It had
      serious problems traversing firewalls, and technically worked
      over VPNs, but was nearly unusable as it required you to
      either replicate your AD server or use AD over the VPN (I do
      not recommend the latter option.)

   d. Like JIRA, in order to do anything interesting with Lotus
      Notes, you effectively had to have admin privileges.  This
      isn't strictly true, but it's effectively true.  Both JIRA
      and Lotus Notes were designed for organizations whose thinky
      bits were managed centrally.  Have a site or department
      specific process?  Better schedule time with your admin to
      talk about how they're going to model your work-flow because
      there's no way you're going to be able to build it yourself.

      Groove was a little better, but it was disturbingly easy for
      the brittle XML based DTDs used to model data to become out
      of sync between users.  Guess it's time to restore from
      backup.

   e. As much as I loved PLATO, it was a centralized / mainframe
      type system.  Of course it was easy to coordinate via a notes
      file, it was a single file on a centrally shared,
      non-replicated volume that (usually) had very loose write
      permissions.

      The reason notes (or it's bastard offspring Lotus Notes)
      didn't take over the world was it put all the thinky bits in
      one place, probably locked down by a BOFH.  There's little we
      learned from the micro-computer revolution from the 70s and
      80s, but what we did seem to get is we all hated being
      dependent on that one guy from accounting to write a few
      COBOL programs for us so we could see what our sales figures
      looked like this month.

   It seems weird we're comparing PLATO NOTES with Lotus Notes
   email.  PNOTES (Personal Notes) was the equivalent of email.
   NOTES was more the equivalent of Usenet News.

   And Notes was an application environment w/ data replication
   that had a shim layer on top of it that looked like an email
   system.  It was more like Hypercard with git-ish semantics.
   (Which now that I think about it, wouldn't be that bad of a
   product.)

   But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird
   as my email client.  If I could figure out a way to get it to
   turn off HTML mail I would.  I'm on the vanguard of the orange
   catholic butlerian jihad.  Not only do I seek a prohibition of
   thinking machines, I'm also quite suspcious of richly formatted
   text.

   Maybe the reason (Lotus) Notes failed was that people kept
   thinking of it as an email client.  Raymond Lowey talked about
   the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle.  Meaning you can
   push product design only so far before people no longer
   understand how they're expected to integrate it into their
   lives.  Lotus Notes was the poster child for this concept.

Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.

At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).

It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.

A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.

The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.

Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”

Did I mention this was Retail?

Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.

At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.

Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.

Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.

I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.

Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.

Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.

https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust