13 ms·

Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

186 points by maguay 8d ago

barbazoo 8d ago
I don't have many memories of my father but one thing I very vaguely remember is the quirky way it would scramble each character when he entered his password in Lotus Notes.
awkwardleon 7d ago
I was at a company acquired by IBM, and left within two years. When asked by HR at my exit interview why I was leaving I honestly answered "Lotus Notes". My reasoning (which I ranted on extensively for the rest of the interview) was that mandating Lotus Notes as a tool internally, let alone continuing to sell it, reflected very poorly on how IBM felt about their employees, customers, and products. Examples: * for YEARS IBM had to ship a "killnotes.exe" utility to their own employees because they couldn't figure out how to gracefully exit the app - and that's just one papercut out of hundreds; * they misrepresented the popularity of the product, as the number of seats sold was tied to other bundled deals - most customers wouldn't touch the product; * they continually gaslit employees and customers that Notes was great for common workflows (email in particular, searching in general) where in fact it was overwhelmingly a failure - and anyone who complained "didn't understand the product"; * they would send out multiple-choice surveys on "How would you like to improve Notes?" with every question and possible answer tied to developer-focused and database features with nothing allowing feedback on the primary use-cases that were driving users up the wall In the end IBM's stance on Notes was either tone-deaf, incompetent, mendacious, malicious, opportunistic, extractive, callous, or shameless with no sense of pride in product. I'm still bitter. Man, I hated that product.
YesThatTom2 7d ago
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-network-notes/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/at-t-dumps-n...
GMoromisato 7d ago
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.
philipstorry 7d ago
I administered messaging and groupware systems for over 15 years. It was a large chunk of my career. I worked with both Exchange Server/Outlook and Lotus Domino/Notes, and generally preferred Lotus Domino - but both had their issues. This article doesn't feel like it was written by someone who was using these platforms, nor like anyone was there at the time was consulted. For example, focusing on F5 is odd. F5 is not the Office refresh key. F9 is. Excel uses it to recalculate. Word uses it to refresh fields. Outlook should have used it to fetch/refresh mail, but for some reason they went with the Windows/IE platform teams' choice of F5. Microsoft did actually switch back to using F9 in Outlook, and there was a significant outcry from their users. None of this is mentioned. Similarly there's a screenshot of a messagebox stating that there are too many windows. No context given, but I'd bet it's from Loutus Notes 4.6 or earlier, which used MDI. MDI is limited to 9 windows. I hit that limit in a lot of applications back in the late WIndows 3.1/early Windows 95 days, at the peak of MDI. Notes Release 5 moved away from MDI, and gave the user a tabbed interface. The Exchange Mail and Outlook clients never used MDI, opening a new window for each mail - which may or may not be a better solution, given that Windows didn't have task stacking on the taskbar at the time. Nine tabs in Notes was just one taskbar entry, nine windows with Outlook was heading towards a serious usability problem... I'd like to note that the Notes client didn't benefit from the network effects that Outlook did. At the time many of the complaints in the article were being made software packaging and deployment was in its infancy. Many environments made Notes and Outlook/Office part of their base build making updates a difficult thing to accomplish. Not to mention that the installers were quite large, taxing many networks of the time. But Outlook had the benefit of being part of Office - sometimes people wanted the latest features in Word or Excel, so the effort was made to update the installation. Notes had no such advantage. A similar network effect arrives when it comes to licensing, given that larger organisations will have volume licensing deals. By contrast on the server side Exchange Server was a complete PITA to upgrade. You don't merely install new software, you build an entire new infrastructure and migrate mailboxes over to it. Very expensive, especially in the days of physical hardware. Whereas Lotus Notes Server/Domino was very easy to upgrade or extend. As a result many Notes installations were up to date on their backend but not the frontend, whereas many Outlook installations were the other way around. Anyway, I've gone on for too long - much like all the products we're discussing here. ;-)
paul_h 7d ago
ThoughtWorks' in joke about pressuring leadership to get us off Notes and into the Google mail/docs regardless of the loss of easy apps: https://noteshater.blogspot.com https://noteshater.blogspot.com
wink 7d ago
Apparently it was just so big and featureful that no 2 people can agree on their experience. I only used it for half a year in 2003, didn't have anything to do with administration. I could receive and send emails, and I think newsgroups (or was that not directly included?), I had not self-hosted email at that point, but of course used it for a couple years. It was better than Outlook at a job I had before that, otherwise I'm really indifferent.
toss1 6d ago
As a former Notes developer/VAR/user, the core platform absolutely had a combination of key functions available nowhere else — distributed, replicated rich-text/object database, DOD-level security, seldom-connected communications/replication model (so fully functional work disconnected as on airplanes was just built-in-ordinary), programmability. And the pricing made it easy to spread - it was the same price for a client or a server, like $35. I think IBM blew it on three areas when they bought Lotus for Notes. 1) Neither Lotus nor IBM treated it as a real developer platform. They brought out new features, but never allowed any sort of compilation or locking of applications. So developers could spend person-years on complex, solid apps, and it was all effectively open-source, so the only revenue model was service, and the next level compelling Notes apps never happened. 2) They never really took seriously the email standardization trend and requirement, as pointed out in the article. I can see why they missed it internally because Notes email in many ways was fundamentally better than regular email, with features/capabilities I still miss everyday, but it was a strategic failure that allowed MS to overtake them. 3a) With the web coming online, they completely blew it on pricing. IBM changed to a high-priced server model, charging by processor cores, often ending up with 5-figure costs just to stand up a server when it had been $35, and not even mitigating it for a small user base, so destroying the entire small business market and small-biz VAR market. 3b) Most critically, with web browsers being free, I'm convinced IBM could have owned the world by making the Notes client free or nearly so. Just the solid certificate/ID/PKI security model is vastly better than anything available today. But IBM basically just forced the entire thing into their corporate client structure and eventually sold off the remains in ~2018, IIRC. IBM bought something that could really have exploded, and instead of adding the resources to make that happen (e.g., cleaning up the UI issues as mentioned in the article, making it more of a platform, pricing as described), they just worked to jam it (badly) into their corporate software offerings.
semessier 6d ago
well it also influenced judgement: the freshly Lou Gerstner Jr. who later danced the elephant into muddy waters appointed "Internet Division" head below https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2005/11/the_ibm_interne.html https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2005/11/the_ibm_interne.html declared in meaning that Notes is for Enterprises and the web browsers for consumers/hobby. Now to settle this once and for all the IBM web browser was canceled.
hnd9q09qk4 8d ago
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rm445 8d ago
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases. 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.
- steveBK123 8d ago
  I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time. I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
  - cube00 8d ago
    > 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.
    - steveBK123 8d ago
      This goes to my same complaint re: some Apple products. Some stuff is solved. It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems. Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.
    - mike_hearn 8d ago
Nursie 8d ago
"Lotes" as we used to call it in my first job. 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.
GrumpyGoblin 8d ago
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
- nchmy 8d ago
  I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
- rsynnott 8d ago
  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…
  - m_mueller 8d ago
    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....
    - cube00 7d ago
      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.
      - m_mueller 7d ago
        The sad thing for me is that Notes’ core data model was really solid. As a rapid internal app dev platform it was ahead of its time in many ways. E.g. Microsoft’s sharepoint and power apps still cannot compete in terms of capabilities. IBM just didn’t know what to do with it.
andrea76 8d ago
As written in the article, the UI sucked to many to us. Then our corporate migred to GMAIL and never looked back.
bux93 8d ago
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985). 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.
orthoxerox 8d ago
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version. 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.
- p2detar 8d ago
  Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
cube00 8d ago
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it. 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.
- andrea76 8d ago
  Our company has now migrated its Lotus applications to web applications written in Java, but it took us quite a few years.
  - _nhh 8d ago
    I am in the middle of it. We might do it till the end of 2026 with only two developers and about 50+ databases. Once we just _ported_ the databases instead of rethinking them, we increased speed by a order of magnitude. We can rethink later on the new platform
VagabundoP 8d ago
Lotus Notes was underrated imo. 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.
- dspillett 7d ago
  > Lotus Notes was underrated imo. For what it was, yes. For what a great many people used it for on the other hand… It was a great platform for making document and workflow control applications, and was ahead of its time in terms of a proper PKI system for authentication/access/verification and access control lists and such. But many people hit a poorly made application and that coloured their opinion for the rest, and in the list of terrible applications I'm including the standard email support, which was a royal PITA, and most custom versions for that function. The general UX wasn't great either, not so bad that you couldn't put up with it for a great application but if you are hating the rest of the application then the general UX issues grind your gears too.
1970-01-01 8d ago
Lotus is the best example of why you don't let IBM touch you.
thrownaway561 8d ago
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI. https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
- saltypixel 8d ago
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flymasterv 8d ago
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.
- GMoromisato 7d ago
  Those were the days! Send me an email--I'd love to reconnect!
  - flymasterv 7d ago
    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.
    - GMoromisato 7d ago
      I18n code is no joke--there's a lot of complexity there. Glad to hear you have fond memories!
- rwmj 8d ago
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/
  - flymasterv 7d ago
    Huh. I somehow missed that 24 years ago. Joel’s right.
- theturtle 8d ago
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le-mark 8d ago
Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something. I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
leoc 8d ago
And this isn't even the real cult PIM application from Lotus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://www.dreamingincode.com/ https://www.dreamingincode.com/
trentor 8d ago
I really liked Lotus Notes.
833dong 8d ago
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alexpotato 8d ago
There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax. 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.
mkovach 8d ago
I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs. 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.
baggachipz 8d ago
My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish). 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.
- gmfawcett 7d ago
  LotusScript was heavily modelled after Visual Basic. I thought it was an awful language to work with. :) But LN was generally a fun platform... as long as you kept things very, very simple.
  - baggachipz 7d ago
    You're right, it was VBScript that it mimicked. I then parlayed that into Active Server Pages, which could use VBScript or JScript. We pivoted into JScript and that's when the web dev world truly opened up for me.
- esafak 8d ago
  > 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. The modern iteration is Notion.
fg137 8d ago
> “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 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.
- redsparrow 7d ago
  As a user of Notes in the mid-late 90s, I found it suuuper annoying. Also, do you want a horizontal scroll bar when the content is too wide for the window? No problem, just turn on the option in the menu. (And then it will be there all the time, whether it's needed or not.) I was administering a small Domino server and using Notes for email. I think it was the worst thing I worked on at the time.
- paul_h 7d ago
  Nobody cares perhaps, but F5 as a refresh key came in the mid 80s (I was told it was a $1m of usability consulting). The midrange AS/400 got [CUA](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=actions-default-cua-function-key-settings https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=actions-default-...) first. There were many more F1 for help, F12 for go-back-a-page, F3 for big-exit of app. Green screen stuff (3270 and 5250 where two common wire/frame protocols). The same keys made the jump to some windows apps. One by one they got whittled away until F5 for refresh was left. For that one it wasn't just Windows - as browser rollout took it wider. Has it gone yet? I'm on a Chromebook and it doesn't have F keys so I can't see for myself.
OhMeadhbh 8d ago
So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a couple of notes. 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.
jbgreer 8d ago
In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc. 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.
_nhh 8d ago
It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my platform i guess.
- kwanbix 8d ago
  I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8. The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem. For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting. It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX. In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running. So sad to see it go.
  - _nhh 8d ago
    > The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go... Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.
- thr0w 8d ago
  That's crazy. I did a Notes migration to a custom Java/Red Hat platform 20 years ago, even at that time it was like "can't believe these guys are on Lotus Notes". I remember Howard Stern used to reference LN on his radio show in the early 90s.
jjkaczor 8d ago
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 varying levels of complexity in each app) What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities. We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app). However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".
- logans_gun 7d ago
  Ever since I moved infra to Linux I’m glad I don’t have to remember to uninstall WebDAV. FUCK!
  - jjkaczor 7d ago
    It's "deprecated" now - service is disabled and you have to jump through hoops to get it working - and even then, it barely works with the latest SPO/M365 authentication rigamarole.
- Hikikomori 7d ago
  We migrated to office 365 around 2013 from notes, horrible to use compared to notes. The project was supposed to pay for itself with loweered license fees for notes users, then it turned out we had 2-3k apps in notes without any migration plan or budget, so most people still needed a lotus license for years.
- high_na_euv 7d ago
  >We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate ???
thataccount 8d ago
Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.
NDizzle 8d ago
I joined a company using Notes back in '00. Performed the 4 to 5 upgrade, skipped 6 and went to 7. We had our "email blast" code in the founder of the companies mail database. When we launched new features or had various announcements, you would log on to Mark's email database and run those features in the drop down. Of course there were various permissions in check that only certain people could do (or view) certain things in the database, but that's where it ended up... I always thought the data/design replication was cool as well. I had to bake in what I called "relational fields" into the documents to be able to perform some standard relational database type of work, but it was really easy to work with overall. Maybe too easy - as one person mentioned in the thread, there were hundreds of little custom apps built by anyone/everyone in the company, because it was just that easy.
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jhallenworld 8d ago
I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow. Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.
slater 8d ago
There was a joke going round when Lotus Notes was still mildly popular: There's exactly two people who LOVE Lotus Notes. One is the boss, cos he's never wrong, and the other is the Lotus Notes developer/integrator, cos he's getting money. EVERYONE else in the org goes "Uggghghghhh, not Lotus Notes!"
rmu09 8d ago
Ca. 2000. Converted a few companies (each around 20-30 mail / calendar users) from novell groupwise and ms exchange to notes/domino. Client OSes were windows 98, maybe even an occasional windows for workgroups. Not smooth sailing. Had to abort at least one conversion in the middle of the night because some "wizard" didn't work. Users were trained in the new ways of email and some proprietary CRM app we developed, but IIRC at least half of the customers rolled back immediately because of user protest over user interface and missing/non-working functionality, one customer even went under. In principle Lotus Notes was the best, but practically, it was horrible.
leapingdog 8d ago
I worked in a group that reverse engineered the Lotus Notes database format. We worked at Lotus Development, but we weren't from Iris or even in the USA. Notes was the golden goose & the risks from leaks were judged too high.
freediddy 8d ago
I used Lotus Notes back in the day. The author is vastly overstating how useful it was. It was mostly useless and overcomplicated most things. Yes, many of the concepts are being used today but at its time, it was an feature that was waiting for a use case.
YuechenLi 7d ago
As someone who used Lotus Notes 6 for over 2 years at my previous job as the primary email client a few years back (think 2020s), no, it was not a pleasant experience to use Lotus Notes, especially since we had a O365 subscription for everything else and our major customer at the time was Microsoft. After a year at that job, it costed me so much productivity that I had to essentially jerry-rig desktop Outlook to work with the Domino server on my machine just so I don't have to fight it every step of the way. The issue with Lotus Notes is that there was too much low-level machinery exposed directly to the client, and things you would expect to work with a basic email client, like .ics invites, simply never works right. There was no good dev environment for it, and most of the "develop your own app" feature was locked by corporate policy anyways so we pretty much had the worst of both worlds. All in all, not something I would recommend to actually use, the only thing it really helped me see is that OneNote's lineage from Lotus Note as I think a lot of the original Lotus Note devs jumped to Microsoft at the time.
- mrj 7d ago
  This is my recollection as well. Microsoft was basically the savior back then, when Lotus was viewed as old and hard to maintain. It wasn't unusual hear from colleagues suffering a multi day Notes outage due to sync issues or the bridge being broken. "Hip" companies moved to Outlook and Exchange.
nradov 7d ago
I did some development work years ago on IBM Lotus Domino. The UI and development features were a dumpster fire, both in the native Notes thick client application and on the web. But there was huge potential in the back-end Domino platform that IBM just threw away through lack of vision. They had a NoSQL document database with multi-master replication and public key security infrastructure before it was cool. It could have been a real competitor to other DB platforms like MongoDB or Couchbase. But IBM never positioned Domino that way and it was always crippled by limitations on maximum database size, lack of XML / JSON support, and crappy SDKs for common languages like Java.
LaSombra 7d ago
As a contractor sysadmin at the time, managing both Exchange and Notes/Domino, I loved Notes for the simplicity of dealing with backups, to tape and over the VPN. You mark the database as read only, copy the .nsf file over, unmark the database as read only, done. Brightstor had a plugin for Notes that did that automatically and could do incremental backups with ease. Move to Exchange and it's horrible single file mail storage solution which was inconceivable when hard drives weren't that big. 10,000 users? It's 100MB of mail so it can fit nicely in a single storage volume. Backups? Well, only at night because you have to unmount the file from Exchange, copy it over, and mount it again, which took a good couple of hours. I miss Notes "simplicity".
ryanm101 7d ago
The worst thing about notes was its ui revamp in 8. It was heavy and slow, I tended to run classic ui. Yes f5 was an issue but only until you did it a couple of times then you remembered. It was funny I recall never having much to do on the domino server, and even the client was pretty stable. When we migrated to Outlook there were non stop server side issues. The fact it had a built in DB was really useful for extension as well. Imo it was ahead of its time and heavily hamstring by Outlook dominance as any nee user landing hated it simply because it wasn't outlook

186 points by maguay 8d ago

I don't have many memories of my father but one thing I very vaguely remember is the quirky way it would scramble each character when he entered his password in Lotus Notes.

awkwardleon 7d ago

I was at a company acquired by IBM, and left within two years. When asked by HR at my exit interview why I was leaving I honestly answered "Lotus Notes". My reasoning (which I ranted on extensively for the rest of the interview) was that mandating Lotus Notes as a tool internally, let alone continuing to sell it, reflected very poorly on how IBM felt about their employees, customers, and products. Examples: * for YEARS IBM had to ship a "killnotes.exe" utility to their own employees because they couldn't figure out how to gracefully exit the app - and that's just one papercut out of hundreds; * they misrepresented the popularity of the product, as the number of seats sold was tied to other bundled deals - most customers wouldn't touch the product; * they continually gaslit employees and customers that Notes was great for common workflows (email in particular, searching in general) where in fact it was overwhelmingly a failure - and anyone who complained "didn't understand the product"; * they would send out multiple-choice surveys on "How would you like to improve Notes?" with every question and possible answer tied to developer-focused and database features with nothing allowing feedback on the primary use-cases that were driving users up the wall In the end IBM's stance on Notes was either tone-deaf, incompetent, mendacious, malicious, opportunistic, extractive, callous, or shameless with no sense of pride in product. I'm still bitter. Man, I hated that product.

YesThatTom2 7d ago

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

GMoromisato 7d ago

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.

philipstorry 7d ago

I administered messaging and groupware systems for over 15 years. It was a large chunk of my career. I worked with both Exchange Server/Outlook and Lotus Domino/Notes, and generally preferred Lotus Domino - but both had their issues. This article doesn't feel like it was written by someone who was using these platforms, nor like anyone was there at the time was consulted. For example, focusing on F5 is odd. F5 is not the Office refresh key. F9 is. Excel uses it to recalculate. Word uses it to refresh fields. Outlook should have used it to fetch/refresh mail, but for some reason they went with the Windows/IE platform teams' choice of F5. Microsoft did actually switch back to using F9 in Outlook, and there was a significant outcry from their users. None of this is mentioned. Similarly there's a screenshot of a messagebox stating that there are too many windows. No context given, but I'd bet it's from Loutus Notes 4.6 or earlier, which used MDI. MDI is limited to 9 windows. I hit that limit in a lot of applications back in the late WIndows 3.1/early Windows 95 days, at the peak of MDI. Notes Release 5 moved away from MDI, and gave the user a tabbed interface. The Exchange Mail and Outlook clients never used MDI, opening a new window for each mail - which may or may not be a better solution, given that Windows didn't have task stacking on the taskbar at the time. Nine tabs in Notes was just one taskbar entry, nine windows with Outlook was heading towards a serious usability problem... I'd like to note that the Notes client didn't benefit from the network effects that Outlook did. At the time many of the complaints in the article were being made software packaging and deployment was in its infancy. Many environments made Notes and Outlook/Office part of their base build making updates a difficult thing to accomplish. Not to mention that the installers were quite large, taxing many networks of the time. But Outlook had the benefit of being part of Office - sometimes people wanted the latest features in Word or Excel, so the effort was made to update the installation. Notes had no such advantage. A similar network effect arrives when it comes to licensing, given that larger organisations will have volume licensing deals. By contrast on the server side Exchange Server was a complete PITA to upgrade. You don't merely install new software, you build an entire new infrastructure and migrate mailboxes over to it. Very expensive, especially in the days of physical hardware. Whereas Lotus Notes Server/Domino was very easy to upgrade or extend. As a result many Notes installations were up to date on their backend but not the frontend, whereas many Outlook installations were the other way around. Anyway, I've gone on for too long - much like all the products we're discussing here. ;-)

paul_h 7d ago

ThoughtWorks' in joke about pressuring leadership to get us off Notes and into the Google mail/docs regardless of the loss of easy apps: https://noteshater.blogspot.com https://noteshater.blogspot.com

wink 7d ago

Apparently it was just so big and featureful that no 2 people can agree on their experience. I only used it for half a year in 2003, didn't have anything to do with administration. I could receive and send emails, and I think newsgroups (or was that not directly included?), I had not self-hosted email at that point, but of course used it for a couple years. It was better than Outlook at a job I had before that, otherwise I'm really indifferent.

toss1 6d ago

As a former Notes developer/VAR/user, the core platform absolutely had a combination of key functions available nowhere else — distributed, replicated rich-text/object database, DOD-level security, seldom-connected communications/replication model (so fully functional work disconnected as on airplanes was just built-in-ordinary), programmability. And the pricing made it easy to spread - it was the same price for a client or a server, like $35. I think IBM blew it on three areas when they bought Lotus for Notes. 1) Neither Lotus nor IBM treated it as a real developer platform. They brought out new features, but never allowed any sort of compilation or locking of applications. So developers could spend person-years on complex, solid apps, and it was all effectively open-source, so the only revenue model was service, and the next level compelling Notes apps never happened. 2) They never really took seriously the email standardization trend and requirement, as pointed out in the article. I can see why they missed it internally because Notes email in many ways was fundamentally better than regular email, with features/capabilities I still miss everyday, but it was a strategic failure that allowed MS to overtake them. 3a) With the web coming online, they completely blew it on pricing. IBM changed to a high-priced server model, charging by processor cores, often ending up with 5-figure costs just to stand up a server when it had been $35, and not even mitigating it for a small user base, so destroying the entire small business market and small-biz VAR market. 3b) Most critically, with web browsers being free, I'm convinced IBM could have owned the world by making the Notes client free or nearly so. Just the solid certificate/ID/PKI security model is vastly better than anything available today. But IBM basically just forced the entire thing into their corporate client structure and eventually sold off the remains in ~2018, IIRC. IBM bought something that could really have exploded, and instead of adding the resources to make that happen (e.g., cleaning up the UI issues as mentioned in the article, making it more of a platform, pricing as described), they just worked to jam it (badly) into their corporate software offerings.

semessier 6d ago

well it also influenced judgement: the freshly Lou Gerstner Jr. who later danced the elephant into muddy waters appointed "Internet Division" head below https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2005/11/the_ibm_interne.html https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2005/11/the_ibm_interne.html declared in meaning that Notes is for Enterprises and the web browsers for consumers/hobby. Now to settle this once and for all the IBM web browser was canceled.

hnd9q09qk4 8d ago

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rm445 8d ago

I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases. 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.

steveBK123 8d ago
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time. I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
- cube00 8d ago
  > 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.
  - steveBK123 8d ago
    This goes to my same complaint re: some Apple products. Some stuff is solved. It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems. Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.
  - mike_hearn 8d ago

Nursie 8d ago

"Lotes" as we used to call it in my first job. 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.

GrumpyGoblin 8d ago

I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?

nchmy 8d ago
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
rsynnott 8d ago
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…
- m_mueller 8d ago
  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....
  - cube00 7d ago
    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.
    - m_mueller 7d ago
      The sad thing for me is that Notes’ core data model was really solid. As a rapid internal app dev platform it was ahead of its time in many ways. E.g. Microsoft’s sharepoint and power apps still cannot compete in terms of capabilities. IBM just didn’t know what to do with it.

andrea76 8d ago

As written in the article, the UI sucked to many to us. Then our corporate migred to GMAIL and never looked back.

bux93 8d ago

The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985). 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.

orthoxerox 8d ago

I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version. 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.

p2detar 8d ago
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.

cube00 8d ago

As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it. 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.

andrea76 8d ago
Our company has now migrated its Lotus applications to web applications written in Java, but it took us quite a few years.
- _nhh 8d ago
  I am in the middle of it. We might do it till the end of 2026 with only two developers and about 50+ databases. Once we just _ported_ the databases instead of rethinking them, we increased speed by a order of magnitude. We can rethink later on the new platform

VagabundoP 8d ago

Lotus Notes was underrated imo. 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.

dspillett 7d ago
> Lotus Notes was underrated imo. For what it was, yes. For what a great many people used it for on the other hand… It was a great platform for making document and workflow control applications, and was ahead of its time in terms of a proper PKI system for authentication/access/verification and access control lists and such. But many people hit a poorly made application and that coloured their opinion for the rest, and in the list of terrible applications I'm including the standard email support, which was a royal PITA, and most custom versions for that function. The general UX wasn't great either, not so bad that you couldn't put up with it for a great application but if you are hating the rest of the application then the general UX issues grind your gears too.

1970-01-01 8d ago

Lotus is the best example of why you don't let IBM touch you.

thrownaway561 8d ago

In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI. https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

saltypixel 8d ago
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flymasterv 8d ago

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.

GMoromisato 7d ago
Those were the days! Send me an email--I'd love to reconnect!
- flymasterv 7d ago
  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.
  - GMoromisato 7d ago
    I18n code is no joke--there's a lot of complexity there. Glad to hear you have fond memories!
rwmj 8d ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/
- flymasterv 7d ago
  Huh. I somehow missed that 24 years ago. Joel’s right.
theturtle 8d ago
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le-mark 8d ago

Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something. I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.

leoc 8d ago

And this isn't even the real cult PIM application from Lotus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://www.dreamingincode.com/ https://www.dreamingincode.com/

trentor 8d ago

I really liked Lotus Notes.

833dong 8d ago

[flagged]

alexpotato 8d ago

There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax. 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.

mkovach 8d ago

I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs. 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.

baggachipz 8d ago

My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish). 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.

gmfawcett 7d ago
LotusScript was heavily modelled after Visual Basic. I thought it was an awful language to work with. :) But LN was generally a fun platform... as long as you kept things very, very simple.
- baggachipz 7d ago
  You're right, it was VBScript that it mimicked. I then parlayed that into Active Server Pages, which could use VBScript or JScript. We pivoted into JScript and that's when the web dev world truly opened up for me.
esafak 8d ago
> 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. The modern iteration is Notion.

fg137 8d ago

> “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 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.

redsparrow 7d ago
As a user of Notes in the mid-late 90s, I found it suuuper annoying. Also, do you want a horizontal scroll bar when the content is too wide for the window? No problem, just turn on the option in the menu. (And then it will be there all the time, whether it's needed or not.) I was administering a small Domino server and using Notes for email. I think it was the worst thing I worked on at the time.
paul_h 7d ago
Nobody cares perhaps, but F5 as a refresh key came in the mid 80s (I was told it was a $1m of usability consulting). The midrange AS/400 got [CUA](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=actions-default-cua-function-key-settings https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=actions-default-...) first. There were many more F1 for help, F12 for go-back-a-page, F3 for big-exit of app. Green screen stuff (3270 and 5250 where two common wire/frame protocols). The same keys made the jump to some windows apps. One by one they got whittled away until F5 for refresh was left. For that one it wasn't just Windows - as browser rollout took it wider. Has it gone yet? I'm on a Chromebook and it doesn't have F keys so I can't see for myself.

OhMeadhbh 8d ago

So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a couple of notes. 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.

jbgreer 8d ago

In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc. 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.

_nhh 8d ago

It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my platform i guess.

kwanbix 8d ago
I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8. The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem. For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting. It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX. In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running. So sad to see it go.
- _nhh 8d ago
  > The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go... Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.
thr0w 8d ago
That's crazy. I did a Notes migration to a custom Java/Red Hat platform 20 years ago, even at that time it was like "can't believe these guys are on Lotus Notes". I remember Howard Stern used to reference LN on his radio show in the early 90s.

jjkaczor 8d ago

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 varying levels of complexity in each app) What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities. We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app). However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".

logans_gun 7d ago
Ever since I moved infra to Linux I’m glad I don’t have to remember to uninstall WebDAV. FUCK!
- jjkaczor 7d ago
  It's "deprecated" now - service is disabled and you have to jump through hoops to get it working - and even then, it barely works with the latest SPO/M365 authentication rigamarole.
Hikikomori 7d ago
We migrated to office 365 around 2013 from notes, horrible to use compared to notes. The project was supposed to pay for itself with loweered license fees for notes users, then it turned out we had 2-3k apps in notes without any migration plan or budget, so most people still needed a lotus license for years.
high_na_euv 7d ago
>We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate ???

thataccount 8d ago

Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.

NDizzle 8d ago

I joined a company using Notes back in '00. Performed the 4 to 5 upgrade, skipped 6 and went to 7. We had our "email blast" code in the founder of the companies mail database. When we launched new features or had various announcements, you would log on to Mark's email database and run those features in the drop down. Of course there were various permissions in check that only certain people could do (or view) certain things in the database, but that's where it ended up... I always thought the data/design replication was cool as well. I had to bake in what I called "relational fields" into the documents to be able to perform some standard relational database type of work, but it was really easy to work with overall. Maybe too easy - as one person mentioned in the thread, there were hundreds of little custom apps built by anyone/everyone in the company, because it was just that easy.

deleted 8d ago

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jhallenworld 8d ago

I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow. Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.

slater 8d ago

There was a joke going round when Lotus Notes was still mildly popular: There's exactly two people who LOVE Lotus Notes. One is the boss, cos he's never wrong, and the other is the Lotus Notes developer/integrator, cos he's getting money. EVERYONE else in the org goes "Uggghghghhh, not Lotus Notes!"

rmu09 8d ago

Ca. 2000. Converted a few companies (each around 20-30 mail / calendar users) from novell groupwise and ms exchange to notes/domino. Client OSes were windows 98, maybe even an occasional windows for workgroups. Not smooth sailing. Had to abort at least one conversion in the middle of the night because some "wizard" didn't work. Users were trained in the new ways of email and some proprietary CRM app we developed, but IIRC at least half of the customers rolled back immediately because of user protest over user interface and missing/non-working functionality, one customer even went under. In principle Lotus Notes was the best, but practically, it was horrible.

leapingdog 8d ago

I worked in a group that reverse engineered the Lotus Notes database format. We worked at Lotus Development, but we weren't from Iris or even in the USA. Notes was the golden goose & the risks from leaks were judged too high.

freediddy 8d ago

I used Lotus Notes back in the day. The author is vastly overstating how useful it was. It was mostly useless and overcomplicated most things. Yes, many of the concepts are being used today but at its time, it was an feature that was waiting for a use case.

YuechenLi 7d ago

As someone who used Lotus Notes 6 for over 2 years at my previous job as the primary email client a few years back (think 2020s), no, it was not a pleasant experience to use Lotus Notes, especially since we had a O365 subscription for everything else and our major customer at the time was Microsoft. After a year at that job, it costed me so much productivity that I had to essentially jerry-rig desktop Outlook to work with the Domino server on my machine just so I don't have to fight it every step of the way. The issue with Lotus Notes is that there was too much low-level machinery exposed directly to the client, and things you would expect to work with a basic email client, like .ics invites, simply never works right. There was no good dev environment for it, and most of the "develop your own app" feature was locked by corporate policy anyways so we pretty much had the worst of both worlds. All in all, not something I would recommend to actually use, the only thing it really helped me see is that OneNote's lineage from Lotus Note as I think a lot of the original Lotus Note devs jumped to Microsoft at the time.

mrj 7d ago
This is my recollection as well. Microsoft was basically the savior back then, when Lotus was viewed as old and hard to maintain. It wasn't unusual hear from colleagues suffering a multi day Notes outage due to sync issues or the bridge being broken. "Hip" companies moved to Outlook and Exchange.

nradov 7d ago

I did some development work years ago on IBM Lotus Domino. The UI and development features were a dumpster fire, both in the native Notes thick client application and on the web. But there was huge potential in the back-end Domino platform that IBM just threw away through lack of vision. They had a NoSQL document database with multi-master replication and public key security infrastructure before it was cool. It could have been a real competitor to other DB platforms like MongoDB or Couchbase. But IBM never positioned Domino that way and it was always crippled by limitations on maximum database size, lack of XML / JSON support, and crappy SDKs for common languages like Java.

LaSombra 7d ago

As a contractor sysadmin at the time, managing both Exchange and Notes/Domino, I loved Notes for the simplicity of dealing with backups, to tape and over the VPN. You mark the database as read only, copy the .nsf file over, unmark the database as read only, done. Brightstor had a plugin for Notes that did that automatically and could do incremental backups with ease. Move to Exchange and it's horrible single file mail storage solution which was inconceivable when hard drives weren't that big. 10,000 users? It's 100MB of mail so it can fit nicely in a single storage volume. Backups? Well, only at night because you have to unmount the file from Exchange, copy it over, and mount it again, which took a good couple of hours. I miss Notes "simplicity".

ryanm101 7d ago

The worst thing about notes was its ui revamp in 8. It was heavy and slow, I tended to run classic ui. Yes f5 was an issue but only until you did it a couple of times then you remembered. It was funny I recall never having much to do on the domino server, and even the client was pretty stable. When we migrated to Outlook there were non stop server side issues. The fact it had a built in DB was really useful for extension as well. Imo it was ahead of its time and heavily hamstring by Outlook dominance as any nee user landing hated it simply because it wasn't outlook