In my experience working with Notes over many years, it was a neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users who also used, for example, MS Office apps. Often, they were cosmetic things. But Notes enabled workflow applications like email on steroids; Microsoft leveraged all it could to displace Notes with Exchange and SharePoint, both IMO technically not as good as Notes in many areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.
I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB per file with no automatic sharding support. And they never added XML or JSON as native data types. So it gradually became useless. What a shame.
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time.
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Another major issue was that the first implementation most people saw of it was the email side, and it could be a truly clunky and unpleasant email client. This soured opinions before people delved into the document management and programmability features that email handling were just one use of.
From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which very little other software did. Though this was also clunky at times especially for non-technical users (has anyone ever made the use of PKI a smooth process for those who don't care to know the details?). Proper ACL management too rather than more simplistic permissions, but again this could be very clunky.
Though I'm not sure why we are talking entirely in the past tense, while Domino & Notes are not widely used anymore, they are still out there and developed (under the name HLC Notes) with the last release (adding LLM based “AI” features, of course…) was Jun last year and a bugfix update a few months later. My experience with Domino/Notes was in the 00s and early 10s when I was the accidental admin (the only guy who really understood it left) of a mail and document server based on it, hopefully the clunkiness complaints at least have been addressed since then.
There were UX horror stories on the web as well. I guess it is the physical connection of having to start up your Notes application in work and being forced to use poorly designed apps.
I'm curious about this part: "The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too."
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
Baffling to see this, in every place I've worked at that used Lotus Notes, it was an absolute dog on the system. Clunky, slow, and ground everything else to a halt. And this was the case even on a relatively modern laptop in 2019. Not what I'd call performant at all!
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
Yes! That's more or less the angle I'm going for. I mean, I don't aim just yet for Emacs-levels of malleability, but at least for something where you can create some useful day to day personal tools.
Correct. Admittedly, graphic design is not even my passion, so there's probably lots of room for improvement. But at this point I've grown accustomed to the friendly face. :D
I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.
Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
I did contract work for a company who made heavy investments into Notes-based applications. The replication capability was super cool. We would setup a new client computer on the corporate LAN, synchronize them to the various Notes databases they needed, then send the computer out to field service reps who would use the computers mostly offline. They updated over a pool of dial-up modems at headquarters. They would run mostly overnight, with the field service reps dialing-in before bed and leaving it to run until it automatically disconnected. Later they used a VPN and dial-up ISPs. It worked astoundingly well.
Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
I’ve seen Notes 3 clients and servers on the usual abandonware sites, but never any pre-3.x version
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which very little other software did. Though this was also clunky at times especially for non-technical users (has anyone ever made the use of PKI a smooth process for those who don't care to know the details?). Proper ACL management too rather than more simplistic permissions, but again this could be very clunky.
Though I'm not sure why we are talking entirely in the past tense, while Domino & Notes are not widely used anymore, they are still out there and developed (under the name HLC Notes) with the last release (adding LLM based “AI” features, of course…) was Jun last year and a bugfix update a few months later. My experience with Domino/Notes was in the 00s and early 10s when I was the accidental admin (the only guy who really understood it left) of a mail and document server based on it, hopefully the clunkiness complaints at least have been addressed since then.
It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.
Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems.
It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox.
Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes.
The web did many things better than notes there much much overlap.
The UI was clunky in some ways.
Some of the concepts like replication were just too much too early for many people to grasp.
SQL rose in the corporate world chipping away further at notes.
The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too.
Unstructured document databases were very polarizing sine people hated them with a passion.
The parent company Lotus main product 1-2-3 which ad dominated the spreadsheet world got smashed by Excel.
There’s more reasons too but there’s enough there you can see the doom of Notes.
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
¹ https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software
https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO
Pretty cool!
That's something I miss with Notion. I basically want a Notion but extensible and malleable like Emacs.
The name gives a weird vibe. But, it's free and it's your project so, whatever. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
San Francisco's school board still uses it: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public
(Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.
Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
Nope it was on good old winNT 4
I think we may have upgraded it to windows server 2000 at one point as well.
I remember that the disk partition it ran on ran out of disk space once.. it kept ticking along. just didnt let users make changes. Amazing stuff.
>Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?