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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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January 07, 2006

Lotus Notes Sucks

Posted by Stowe Boyd

I noticed the "Lotus Notes Sucks" meme has resurfaced and is actively being pushed under by various Notes stalwarts (see here and here), principally because of the Lotus Notes Sucks website:

[from Lotus Notes Sucks]
Why does Lotus Notes suck? Except for security, the reasons include:

The user interface is by far the worst there is for professionally written software. This doesn't mean every other email application is good, just that Lotus Notes is terrible. Having used about a dozen email applications over the years, I can authoritatively state that Lotus Notes is the worst. Which email applications have I used?

Unix mail

Zmail

Pine

Some ancient WordPerfect product from the early 1990s

Outlook

Outlook Express

cc:Mail

And others I can't remember.

It displays useless and incomprehensible error messages.

Lotus Notes is slow, ugly-looking and violates all sorts of GUI conventions.

It deletes mail messages when you don't expect it to.

It a confusing, horrible mess. It is truly awful. I don't use Lotus Notes for anything but email—and only because I have to. I avoid using Lotus Notes as much as possible. Its scheduling, calendar, messaging, to do list—everything about it just sucks. Don't take my word for how much it sucks. Go to the examples! The examples show flaws from Lotus Notes version 5.0.8.

The author is purportedly an employee of some company where he is forced to use Lotus Notes, and it really, really irks him. Bad.

The defense of Lotus Notes is jui-jitsu-like, requiring agility and indirection. The argument runs like so.

Lotus Notes is a great technology/product. It was designed to be a platform on which collaborative applications can be developed, to do all sorts of things. It, as a result, has a very complex and sophisticated core, which is truly a marvel to behold, if you are the sort of person -- tool developer, for example -- who can appreciate such things. It isn't fair to evaluate Lotus Notes, the platform, based on the email and calendar applications that run on that platform. They may be less than wonderful, but Lotus Notes is great.

This is a lot of mealy-mouthed bait-and-switch.

First of all, Lotus Notes is a hog. It is huge, an application platform with pretensions of being an operating system. Ozzie, the architect behind Notes, clearly decided that the operating systems in wide use at the time of its design, just before the rise of the Web, were based on the wrong model, and he decided to rectify that (like he tried to do again, later, with even less success with Groove... although he managed to sell that to Microsoft. Go figure.). What were the flaws he wanted to fix? In a computer network, people will naturally create local files on their PCs, and this is an impediment to collaboration. But the operating systems know nothing about human striving toward collaborative goals, and they make it difficult to share files and the information within them effectively. And so, the answer? A big collaboration platform, that will support collaboration by putting a big, fat, slow abstraction layer above the operating systems being used.

And oh, by the way, let's stick an email solution on there too. And a calendar.

The problem is, in the world of the 90s and into the present day, email was the centerpoint of everything, even for people using Notes... because most people in the world don't have Notes, and you need to collaborate with them, too.

So, naturally, Notes The Platform is judged by comparison with alternative solutions that allow you to communicate and coordinate with anyone, anywhere... not just with other users of the same collaboration product you are using. The point that is missed by the Lotus Notes advocates is that people want to be able to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with anyone, not just those who are using the same programs as them. That's why email was the killer app of Web 1.0 -- it worked that way. And Notes has fallen by the wayside, an asterisk in the collaboration chronicles, but all being said, not really very successful -- aside from the acquisition by IBM as a counter to Microsoft's enterprise email dominance.

[An aside: I happened to be in the IBM headquarters the day that the Lotus acquisition was announced, walking around with a Lotusphere PC bag, and I didn't understand for several hours why people where giving me the thumbs up as I walked around.]

Ozzie was right and he was wrong. Yes, the OSes of the day were badly designed with regard to our need for collaboration; but building a big, fat, slow platform to build collaborative apps on is the wrong approach. Even building a small, not so slow platform is the wrong approach. The right thing to do is to build collaboration into the apps that people are using. Or build small, focused collaborative apps that do one thing right. This is one of the lessons of Web 2.0.

Of course, today, we have the modern web infrastructure to exploit, and better OSes, and more bandwidth, and faster PCs. So I am willing to cut the Notes guys some slack since they were developing back in the pleistocene, but I still think they took the wrong fork in the road. That's one of the reasons that something as uncollaborative as Outlook kicked their ass, no matter how much "better" of a platform Notes was.

tags: lotus+notes+sucks, lotus+notes, microsoft+outlook, collaboration, web+2.0

Comments (22) + TrackBacks (3) | Category: Technology

COMMENTS

1. Sim' on January 7, 2006 08:14 PM writes...

I feel the next few years will be very interesting in the realm of corporate application platforms.

Web 2.0 is all well and good - but can you run your enterprise with it ? Perhaps if you are a small company and people are 99% of your assets, and collaboration is the only thing that matters.

But for people who need real application functionality - who have *complex* computing requirements - the web just isn't enough.

Notes was very very good as an application platform, and was (still is) "good enough" (in my opinion) as an email client.

We're on the cusp of a very big step forward in enterprise computing. I think web browsers will play a very big part in this, but I also think that low cost-of-ownership server-managed clients will make a massive difference to the client computing platform of the future.

Collaboration is critically important - Lotus have always preached that - but it's not the only thing that runs a business.

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January 07, 2006

Lotus Notes Sucks

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