
Ray Ozzie on Lotus Notes and Slow Hunch Innovation (2011) - wslh
https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/ray-ozzie-on-lotus-notes-and-slow-hunch-innovation-5bb8c739111e
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jedwhite
Two interesting quotes for me:

"I love being around people who just don’t believe things can’t be done, or
don’t know that they can’t be done, and just build whatever the concept
requires."

"And so you might look at somebody and say: “You’re a one-trick pony. You keep
building the same thing over and over.” But it’s a good thing! That means
you’re taking those patterns and just recasting them continuously against
changes in the environment."

Both seem a little contrarian in the current climate.

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kumarvvr
About 2007-2008 I was working in a Lotus Notes dev group within IBM, India.

I was pleasantly surprised with the capability of the platform. One of the
most touted features is the identity security within the LN eco-system.

Also, the platform is complete with its concepts of user programmable apps
over a common set of services provided by the server and client programs. We
could develop advanced workflow applications, logging applications, user time
sheet applications, etc within a matter of days. It was a really powerful
platform.

The only problem was that the server and client were very bloated and very
slow. I guess the modern version of LN is Sharepoint.

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chiph
The Notes backend was amazingly powerful. The problem was it was saddled with
this mid 90's user interface.

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rozzie
Thank you. We were very fortunate to have had the opportunity in 1984 to
incorporate many concepts that seem to have withstood the test of time - a
NOSQL db, masterless dB replication, end-to-end encryption, decentralized
federated PKI, pure functional query/form language, etc.

Especially proud of what the core team of 5 was able to accomplish, with ~3M
lines of C operating smoothly (b/e + f/e) within the 250KB working set imposed
by the win2 environment of the time.

But you can’t blame the UI on mid 90’s. We very intentionally kept the dev
team very small, and yet business reasons we needed to do concurrent UI ports
to Windows, Mac, OS/2, OpenLook and Motif.

Instead of scaling the team to do a best of breed native UI for each target,
we constrained ourselves to building a “greatest common multiple” portability
layer that worked but felt foreign and awkward everywhere.

I still believe that self-imposed prioritization of constrained core team size
was right for the time, even in that period of hyper growth, but the entire UI
should have been completely revamped when success allowed for it and the team
was ultimately scaled up. No excuses for that.

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chiph
Thanks for the reply. I think that a portable UI that gives everyone a native
look & feel is still not a solved problem, even today.

Regarding your resource constraints - I'm guilty of assuming that it's all
IBM's fault because Notes used the OS/2 keyboard shortcuts (they had a name
for this standard which I forget). And not that Notes was developed by Iris,
which was separate (other than funding) from Lotus. And was a relatively small
firm. My apologies.

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abalone
Honestly this just read like an attempt to link Ozzie's name to this guru's
"branded" concept of "slow hunch innovation".

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TruffleLabs
Yes, it was too short on material. The title implied more.

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swrobel
I know Notes is considered great software, and Ozzie is given a lot of credit
as a result, but I’ll never understand. I had the displeasure of working for a
bank back in 2007 (that deservedly ceased to exist after the financial
crisis), and we used Notes, which sticks in my craw to this day as some of the
worst software that I’ve ever used (and I regularly had to use Crystal Reports
at this job).

Search was so bad that meetings with my manager frequently started with him
turning his monitor so we could both see it, sorting his sent mail by
recipient, and saying “now what day do you think I sent you that email” after
which I would watch him scroll endlessly thinking “I’ll never get this part of
my life back.”

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smacktoward
Notes was like a combination of the worst qualities of SharePoint and Excel.
Like SharePoint, it was "enterprise software" first and foremost, so no
attention whatsoever was given to providing a friendly user interface. And
like Excel, while to technical people it looks like a God-spited monstrosity,
it allowed a certain type of non-technical person to solve problems on their
own that would otherwise have required buying expensive software or getting
programming help from their IT department (which, in the enterprise, good
luck).

So it ended up growing like kudzu, wedging itself into all sorts of weird
niches. And because it had the affection of both the enterprise "IT
strategists" and that certain type of non-technical end user, once it grew
into one of those niches it was insanely hard to dislodge from it. You had to
point your flamethrowers in two directions at once.

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TruffleLabs
Lol, I will now avoid “Kudzu” as the name of my app

Sort of reminds me of the Banyan VINES product name; a biological reference on
how the banyan tree grew, making many connections across a grove of banyan
trees.

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ribs
From 2011, should probably change the title.

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dang
Added. Thanks!

