
Lotus: Farewell to a Once-Great Tech Brand - technologizer
http://techland.time.com/2012/11/20/lotus-farewell-to-a-once-great-tech-brand/
======
bguthrie
I interned at IBM/Lotus in 2006, when I was still in college. I don't know
much about its history pre-Notes, which is mostly what the article is focused
on. But I liked the place, and I appreciated my time there. It had a lot of
history.

Notes is a fascinating example of the power and danger of a large legacy
customer base. Their UI predated Windows, and any change they made risked to
either the look and feel or the backend data model risked alienating their
already dwindling list of customers, many of whom were looking for an excuse
to leave anyway. Nonetheless, those users kept them afloat for years, and
still do.

It's easy to forget that the power of the platform is not in the email, which
sucked; it handled authentication, security, and replication for a wide array
of largely drag-and-drop business applications. If you're an enterprise, and
what you basically need to automate your workflow is a form and a little bit
of glue code, there's a lot to be said for that system; old companies that
claw their way out of it find themselves now saddled to shaky, expensive
bespoke web applications that don't work offline. Because of this, it was a
devil to migrate off of; even IBM tried, and failed, to rewrite it, in the
form of Lotus Workplace. Talk about lock-in.

Still, I'll miss the name.

~~~
Peaker
Lotus Notes is one of the worst, most agonizing pieces of software I have had
to use.

When I read the headline, I had a glimpse of Hope that Lotus Notes might be
discontinued, and that I may stop using that horrible, clunky, unstable, slow
UI.

~~~
ccozan
Depends. Coming from a different direction, meaning a non-MS world, I found
Lotus really pleasant to work with and extremely powerfull. The DB-style of
everything, the apps that you could embed into it made it very enterprise, for
it could automatize a lot of the processes and internal flows.

Unfortunatelly, in a MS world domination for home computers, a new employee
would find Lotus quite strange and unappealing. Sad.

PS. the article makes a mistake too, the full SmartSuite costs 342$ not just
the 1-2-3.

~~~
Peaker
I don't actually use any MS software whatsoever.

I think the clunkiness, the slowness, the instability, are objectively bad
traits of Notes no matter your background.

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pdenya
Excerpt:

    
    
        on Notes for years, and never thought it lived up to the hallowed Lotus name. It was a fabulous product if you were an IT person, but so poorly designed from a productivity standpoint
    

It's amazing how far you can get by pleasing the IT people who as far as I can
tell are the only group that's pleased with the current version of Notes.

My first experience with Lotus Notes was in 2005 and I found it to be a
bloated piece of crap with archaic email rendering, barely functioning search,
and long wait times for even basic operations. I was hoping to see news that
IBM was sunsetting the entire product along with the Domino servers it runs
on.

~~~
smackfu
I don't know, it's kind of fun to use as a programmer too. I can redesign my
personal email view to anything I want.

~~~
gadders
This. Designer access to your mailfile, and a full text index and it was a
pretty good email client that you could tailor how you liked.

~~~
Peaker
I think the Lotus Notes as a GUI platform is so horrid that it couldn't
possibly be good at anything:

* It comes with a program "Zap Notes" which is supposed to kill it when it hangs (Wat?). A bit funny since "Zap Notes" doesn't even work for me, and I have to use a combination of greps and kills.

* The UI rendering is slow and visible. These guys haven't heard of double buffering. You see little GUI components being rendered slowly. This is extremely annoying and sluggish.

* Every little UI operation you do in this program can take _seconds_ on relatively modern hardware. During these seconds, the UI is of course completely blocked.

* When someone at your corporate IT wants to move a Notes mail server or such -- they actually have to coordinate a reconfiguration of all the users' mail server addresses! You have to go dig in a huge, badly designed preferences dialog to make this change. This is nuts.

The list goes on and on, but I can't fathom anyone liking this software.

~~~
smackfu
Run "nsd -kill" from your notes dir. ZapNotes is very 2005.

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mapgrep
Damien Katz had said the document-like Lotus Notes db inspired him to create
CouchDB.

He talked about this in a 2009 podcast: "You can think of Damien Katz' CouchDB
project as the distilled 'good stuff' from Lotus Notes. Wait! Why are you
running away? Come back! It's not that bad! We swear!"
<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4150.html>

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michaelhoffman
My favorite Lotus program was the revolutionary Improv
<[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv>](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv>).
I'm sad that its user interface didn't catch on, although some parts of it are
available in things like pivot tables (albeit clunkier to use in my opinion).

~~~
jacques_chester
Your link is broken because you've used < and >.

Innovations on the spreadsheet have regularly failed to catch on. Improv is
one. And I learned the other day that Resolver One has been discontinued.

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rmason
I fondly remember the first version of Lotus 123. Started out writing a simple
macro and then entire programs automating the business where I was working.

The bosses thought it was magic. It was so much fun I'd regularly stay after
work for hours sometimes. Then I discovered dBase II which allowed me to do
even more ;<).

~~~
DanielBMarkham
We have very similar histories. As an assistant manager at a Dominos I had the
entire store's books ran on 123. It was an enchanted experience to take the
drudgery of the daily, weekly, and monthly paperwork and make it all magic.
Very good times.

I did that again with DBaseIII for a small trucking company. After a third
time, I finally figured out that programming had selected me, whether I wanted
it or not. It was just too cool (and lucrative) to turn down.

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cdk
I felt that Lotus Notes was trying to do too many things when in reality most
people were using it for email and calendaring.

The UI looked terrible and it was overall slow and crashed often. You had to
manually kill the zombie process or else you would not be able to re-open
Lotus Notes.

~~~
coin
Yes, Lotus even provides a KillNotes utility on their website.

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anu_gupta
The only Lotus product I remember with affection is Agenda - which is still
the best PIM I've ever used. I never understood why they stopped development
on it, and I've never understood why someone hasn't developed a functional
equivalent.

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anthony_barker
Lotus was one of the most successful start-ups ever under the visionary Mitch
Kapor. Lotus came from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a
teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor>

Mitch started all the projects that kept the company afloat for 15 years. My
favorites were: Notes, Magellan, Agenda, and Improv and internally used Orion
(search tool).

Jim Manzi the Mckinsey consultant who took over from him successful acquired
and killed about 10 good companies (Approach, cc:Mail, Amipro).

Lotus Notes was a very good workflow development tool that forced to support
email to sell more copies. Most large companies still don't have cultures that
support open sharing of information and use email as the defacto workflow
tool.

Check out <http://www.lotusmuseum.com/>

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zxypoo
To this date, one of my favorite sites out there is the Lotus Notes sucks
site: <http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/>

Love the error messages: <http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx70.html>

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wittekm
Oh god, I was worried for a moment this was about the car brand.

(Though they're probably on their way out too.)

~~~
pinchyfingers
They've got a popular driver and a Formula One win this year, so they'll
probably stick around a while longer.

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ksec
Lotus Notes as an Email client sucks. And i am forced to use it in my company.
I guess since i dont use it that way, Lotus Notes is a very powerful
"platform", that allows you to create different things around it. Viewing as a
application, it is just truly awful.

The best thing i have read is that Notes will have a plug in ( Why Plugin ? )
for browsers that allows you to fully access all of its functionality. I hope
the mail part could be used from browser without the plugin. That way i no
longer have to fire up the slow and bloated application for what i consider a
simple task of emailing.

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timrichard
I used to do some development in Notes/Domino. Desperately uncool....

Although you could describe it as a fork of Apache, with a solid auth engine
baked in, tightly coupled to a BTree-based NoSQL persistence engine and a
scripting layer supporting Java or a dialect of VBScript. Released in the late
90's....

So perhaps hipsters would say it was ahead of its time... :-P

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smackfu
For anyone else who doesn't read the article: Notes isn't going away. The
"Lotus" part of "Lotus Notes" is going away.

~~~
Nursie
Yup.

IIRC big blue's software group are slowly trying to blur the lines between
their various brands in order to seem more integrated and go back to just
being IBM software.

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gadders
Ex-Lotii here. I joined in '93 supporting 1-2-3 for Dos, 1-2-3 for Windows and
Lotus Approach.

I also taught myself Notes while I was there.

Notes looks kind of weird now, but pre-internet days it was the only real way
to create an "intranet", and it's workflow capabilities were pretty cool.

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crag
Good old Lotus 1-2-3. Brings back memories and a few horror stories. I
remember Word Star from that era too. And dBase. Those 3 apps were in every
office in New York.

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account_taken
Visicalc ... Lotus 1-2-3 ... Borland Quattro ... Microsoft Excel ... Google
Spreadsheets

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djhworld
Lotus Notes is the worst piece of software ever written.

