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I know Notes is considered great software, and Ozzie is given a lot of credit as a result, but I’ll never understand. I had the displeasure of working for a ban

I know Notes is considered great software, and Ozzie is given a lot of credit as a result, but I’ll never understand. I had the displeasure of working for a bank back in 2007 (that deservedly ceased to exist after the financial crisis), and we used Notes, which sticks in my craw to this day as some of the worst software that I’ve ever used (and I regularly had to use Crystal Reports at this job). Search was so bad that meetings with my manager frequently started with him turning his monitor so we could both see it, sorting his sent mail by recipient, and saying “now what day do you think I sent you that email” after which I would watch him scroll endlessly thinking “I’ll never get this part of my life back.”

smacktoward 8y ago
Notes was like a combination of the worst qualities of SharePoint and Excel. Like SharePoint, it was "enterprise software" first and foremost, so no attention whatsoever was given to providing a friendly user interface. And like Excel, while to technical people it looks like a God-spited monstrosity, it allowed a certain type of non-technical person to solve problems on their own that would otherwise have required buying expensive software or getting programming help from their IT department (which, in the enterprise, good luck). So it ended up growing like kudzu, wedging itself into all sorts of weird niches. And because it had the affection of both the enterprise "IT strategists" and that certain type of non-technical end user, once it grew into one of those niches it was insanely hard to dislodge from it. You had to point your flamethrowers in two directions at once.
- TruffleLabs 8y ago
  Lol, I will now avoid “Kudzu” as the name of my app Sort of reminds me of the Banyan VINES product name; a biological reference on how the banyan tree grew, making many connections across a grove of banyan trees.

smacktoward 8y ago

Notes was like a combination of the worst qualities of SharePoint and Excel. Like SharePoint, it was "enterprise software" first and foremost, so no attention whatsoever was given to providing a friendly user interface. And like Excel, while to technical people it looks like a God-spited monstrosity, it allowed a certain type of non-technical person to solve problems on their own that would otherwise have required buying expensive software or getting programming help from their IT department (which, in the enterprise, good luck). So it ended up growing like kudzu, wedging itself into all sorts of weird niches. And because it had the affection of both the enterprise "IT strategists" and that certain type of non-technical end user, once it grew into one of those niches it was insanely hard to dislodge from it. You had to point your flamethrowers in two directions at once.

TruffleLabs 8y ago
Lol, I will now avoid “Kudzu” as the name of my app Sort of reminds me of the Banyan VINES product name; a biological reference on how the banyan tree grew, making many connections across a grove of banyan trees.