4 ms·

On the desktop, Lotus Notes was a popular complex workflow builder for a time in the 80s and 90s.

• bitwize 9y ago
  And people fucking hated it.
  • m_mueller 9y ago
    But not because of the workflows. I'd argue it was hated mostly because its changing management at some point decided they need to market it as a (poor) groupware/messaging platform rather than an application platform, for which I'd argue it's still great. Once you've replicated an application locally it allows interacting with near zero latency. Development is possible for non-programmers who are proficient at developing excel spreadsheet - the alternative at the same development cost is sending those around.
  • goatlover 9y ago
    I thought it was great for building custom workflows, and I don't know that anything has replaced it since. People seem to hate Lotus Mail in favor of Outlook, for some reason. I always thought Microsoft was way behind Lotus in the workflow department, but people were used to MS products. Maybe it got worse over time with IBM's mismanagement, and I haven't used it in 15 years. I recently had to cobble together a worfklow in Drupal, and it was terrible in comparison to what could easily be done in the late 90s with Notes (which did have a web front end by then).