Lotus Notes

“Many of these tools had been abandoned but still had wormed their way into critical business processes”

“software that was full of super-clever hacks, starting with the batshit crazy login prompt”

“Lotus Notes was too big, too self-contained, and too weird to be "Something bigger than a weird email client.”

“Notes clocking the lines, keeping dial on demand open and requiering the implementation of WAN accelarators”

“Lotus Notes actually had the design and data stored independent of one another”

“Notes’ core data model was really solid. As a rapid internal app dev platform it was ahead of its time in many ways.”

“in the list of terrible applications I'm including the standard email support, which was a royal PITA”

“I loved Notes for the simplicity of dealing with backups, to tape and over the VPN.”

“Then there were those "replication failures", sometimes trivial to fix, sometimes completely impossible to debug.”

“very featureful and cool but the amount of support and hardware required was quite high”

“I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.”

“it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure”

“Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run”

“the Eclipse version still had the old DLLs underneath with just a rather superficial Java layer put on top”

“It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem”

“I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons.”

“Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one custom app or a hundred.”

“Enterprise software" has been awful for decades, things like Lotus Notes and SAP.”

“Take in this horror: the F500 i got my first job at was using Notes until 2021”

“it's literally the only good thing about Lotus Notes, which was the most archaic and primitive piece of commercial GUI software”

“It was SO fast to write things in Lotus Notes, that is crazy. I did it for 10 years.”

“Lotus Notes had 3 different ways to look for info, the most powerfull one being indexing the database.”

“email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo.”

“Fairly simple to create an application but not being open source was a problem.”

“Notes Email was just another app, it didn’t have some of the specific polish that even Outlook had.”

“nonstop client crashes/unresponsiveness, and moronic UI decisions some 3-person team made in like 1987”

“performance at roughly hundreds of thousands of documents was extremely elusive”

“It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.”

“neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users”

“It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky.”

“having to start up your Notes application in work and being forced to use poorly designed apps”

“Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use.”

“It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.”

“Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system”

“It is still ahead of its time when it comes to having a document database that supports merging”

“It will beats outlook as a mail client in a lot of ways, such as having actual usable full text search.”

“we referred to it internally as “Bloatus Goats” such was the disdain we had for it.”

“Not a single person enjoyed using it, and nobody on my team enjoyed servicing it.”

“it was impressive how reasonably solid it's ability was to be offline-first”

“Yep, it is a hated platform now, but back in its heyday, it had similar business impact”