alt Hacker NewsI was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
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Cut my teeth in Lotus Notes development. The combination of forms, views, and agents with the Notes security model was really powerful. I look at products like Notion and Coda and see nothing but Notes forms and views and formulas everywhere. Ray Ozzie was way ahead of his time.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB per file with no automatic sharding support. And they never added XML or JSON as native data types. So it gradually became useless. What a shame.
> Lotus Notes died because the web took over
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time.
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Do you know, does anyone still have copies of Notes versions 1 and 2?
I’ve seen Notes 3 clients and servers on the usual abandonware sites, but never any pre-3.x version
There were many reasons Notes died.
It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.
Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems.
It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox.
Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes.
The web did many things better than notes there much much overlap.
The UI was clunky in some ways.
Some of the concepts like replication were just too much too early for many people to grasp.
SQL rose in the corporate world chipping away further at notes.
The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too.
Unstructured document databases were very polarizing sine people hated them with a passion.
The parent company Lotus main product 1-2-3 which ad dominated the spreadsheet world got smashed by Excel.
There’s more reasons too but there’s enough there you can see the doom of Notes.
Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
I am still convinced, that one way to foster professionalism in working e-mail and to facilitate collaboration would be to use e-mail as the interface for a content management system:
- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)
- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update
- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link
(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)