4 ms·

Lotus Notes was an awful way to do anything. It allowed people with little to no programming skill to destroy the IT capabilities of small business and non-prof

Lotus Notes was an awful way to do anything. It allowed people with little to no programming skill to destroy the IT capabilities of small business and non-profits. If that had been backed by anyone except Lotus it would have died on the drawing board (as it should have).

flomo 13y ago
That was the entire appeal of Notes/Hypercard, people could throw together a small database application and it wasn't any more difficult than creating a spreadsheet. (The big difference was that Notes apps were automatically network client-server.) I think it's rather cynical and elitist to say that something which empowered users "destroyed IT capabilities", and it's not like many of those small orgs really had IT capabilities. But like HC, the Notes designer software was turned into an added-cost product, and after that both Notes and HC became the domain of 'IT experts' that knew how to work around the limitations of a rinky-dink platform. This was all long ago, for most people now Notes is just a terrible email application.
- doctorwho 13y ago
  Notes was always a terrible email application :) You are right about the level of IT capability of most small shops, maybe I "crippled" would have been better than "destroyed". But elitist? Have you ever considered working on your home furnace? There are people who can do these things. The ones who THINK they can do it are Darwin Award winners. The downside of an amateur rolling their own solution in Notes was not life threatening but it certainly wasn't smart. Notes gave people who had no idea what they were doing the confidence to build solutions that were fine for personal use but completely unsustainable at even small office scale. The "experts" who adopted HC and Notes were the ones who did the real damage though. These folks (and I knew a few) were just a step above the guy in the office who refilled the toner in the photocopier. They created half-working systems and then moved on. They didn't have to live with the technical debt they left in their wake. They set unrealistic expectations for what good IT solutions should cost and left guys like me trying to clean up their mess for years.
  - flomo 13y ago
    Sorry, I wrote a fairly long reply and HN told me my link had expired and the text was lost. Perhaps too long then :) In any case, Notes ended up sucking, anyone who saw what happened can toast to that.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > Sorry, I wrote a fairly long reply and HN told me my link had expired and the text was lost. Some suggestions. First, if you've typed longer than a minute, make a backup copy of your reply, even go so far as to compose it in a separate text editor, then paste the result into HN. Second, if you encounter the dreaded "link expired" message, select all (Ctrl+A) then copy (Ctrl+C) the content of the entry window, then press browser refresh, then paste (Ctrl+V) the text you just copied. Then click "Reply."
      - flomo 13y ago
        Hypothetically, if you stumbled upon some folks arguing about Lotus Notes R3, wouldn't you assume they knew the standard windows shortcuts? (Trick question, R3 only had ctrl-insert etc OS/2 shortcuts!) In any case I apologize my paste-buffer foibles denied you my three paragraphs of immense wisdom regarding the good & bad of an obsolete end-user friendly distributed database system that went out of style a couple decades ago.
        lutusp 13y ago
        > Hypothetically, if you stumbled upon some folks arguing about Lotus Notes R3, wouldn't you assume they knew the standard windows shortcuts? Lowest common denominator, as they say. When I encounter someone who loses his content on the HN interface, I make some simplifying assumptions. :)

flomo 13y ago

That was the entire appeal of Notes/Hypercard, people could throw together a small database application and it wasn't any more difficult than creating a spreadsheet. (The big difference was that Notes apps were automatically network client-server.) I think it's rather cynical and elitist to say that something which empowered users "destroyed IT capabilities", and it's not like many of those small orgs really had IT capabilities. But like HC, the Notes designer software was turned into an added-cost product, and after that both Notes and HC became the domain of 'IT experts' that knew how to work around the limitations of a rinky-dink platform. This was all long ago, for most people now Notes is just a terrible email application.

doctorwho 13y ago
Notes was always a terrible email application :) You are right about the level of IT capability of most small shops, maybe I "crippled" would have been better than "destroyed". But elitist? Have you ever considered working on your home furnace? There are people who can do these things. The ones who THINK they can do it are Darwin Award winners. The downside of an amateur rolling their own solution in Notes was not life threatening but it certainly wasn't smart. Notes gave people who had no idea what they were doing the confidence to build solutions that were fine for personal use but completely unsustainable at even small office scale. The "experts" who adopted HC and Notes were the ones who did the real damage though. These folks (and I knew a few) were just a step above the guy in the office who refilled the toner in the photocopier. They created half-working systems and then moved on. They didn't have to live with the technical debt they left in their wake. They set unrealistic expectations for what good IT solutions should cost and left guys like me trying to clean up their mess for years.
- flomo 13y ago
  Sorry, I wrote a fairly long reply and HN told me my link had expired and the text was lost. Perhaps too long then :) In any case, Notes ended up sucking, anyone who saw what happened can toast to that.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > Sorry, I wrote a fairly long reply and HN told me my link had expired and the text was lost. Some suggestions. First, if you've typed longer than a minute, make a backup copy of your reply, even go so far as to compose it in a separate text editor, then paste the result into HN. Second, if you encounter the dreaded "link expired" message, select all (Ctrl+A) then copy (Ctrl+C) the content of the entry window, then press browser refresh, then paste (Ctrl+V) the text you just copied. Then click "Reply."
    - flomo 13y ago
      Hypothetically, if you stumbled upon some folks arguing about Lotus Notes R3, wouldn't you assume they knew the standard windows shortcuts? (Trick question, R3 only had ctrl-insert etc OS/2 shortcuts!) In any case I apologize my paste-buffer foibles denied you my three paragraphs of immense wisdom regarding the good & bad of an obsolete end-user friendly distributed database system that went out of style a couple decades ago.
      - lutusp 13y ago
        > Hypothetically, if you stumbled upon some folks arguing about Lotus Notes R3, wouldn't you assume they knew the standard windows shortcuts? Lowest common denominator, as they say. When I encounter someone who loses his content on the HN interface, I make some simplifying assumptions. :)