I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]<p>Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.<p>And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!<p>In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.<p>Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.<p>The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time.<p>Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB per file with no automatic sharding support. And they never added XML or JSON as native data types. So it gradually became useless. What a shame.
With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
There were many reasons Notes died.<p>It was <i>very</i> hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.<p>Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems.<p>It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox.<p>Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes.<p>The web did many things better than notes there much much overlap.<p>The UI was clunky in some ways.<p>Some of the concepts like replication were just too much too early for many people to grasp.<p>SQL rose in the corporate world chipping away further at notes.<p>The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too.<p>Unstructured document databases were very polarizing sine people hated them with a passion.<p>The parent company Lotus main product 1-2-3 which ad dominated the spreadsheet world got smashed by Excel.<p>There’s more reasons too but there’s enough there you can see the doom of Notes.
I'm building an app that is, in a way, a modern take on Lotus Notes (<a href="https://github.com/superegodev/superego" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/superegodev/superego</a>), and I couldn't feel this more:<p>> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.<p>Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".<p>But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there <i>can</i> be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.<p>Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that <i>can</i> be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.<p>¹ <a href="https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software" rel="nofollow">https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software</a>
Just watched your demo here:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO</a><p>Pretty cool!
Is there a story behind the old guy in the logo?
Many people seem to associate "ego" with negative connotation.<p>The name gives a weird vibe. But, it's free and it's your project so, whatever. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...</a>
Lotus Notes was astounding when it arrived.<p>Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.<p>Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.<p>The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.<p>Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.<p>At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
I did contract work for a company who made heavy investments into Notes-based applications. The replication capability was super cool. We would setup a new client computer on the corporate LAN, synchronize them to the various Notes databases they needed, then send the computer out to field service reps who would use the computers mostly offline. They updated over a pool of dial-up modems at headquarters. They would run mostly overnight, with the field service reps dialing-in before bed and leaving it to run until it automatically disconnected. Later they used a VPN and dial-up ISPs. It worked astoundingly well.<p>Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.<p>Domino server was <i>rock solid</i> I never had to worry about it at all.<p>Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.