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Comment by CobrastanJorji

20 days ago

This may be a bit of an old allusion, but Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Notes is fundamentally a programmable, non-relational, client/server replicated database with a UI on top of it. It's a workflow engine for accomplishing whatever business processes a company might have that can be made to keep working pretty well when the client computer is offline. It can be anything.

But it is remembered first and foremost as an email system, a feature that's fairly trivial to implement once you have a replicated database and a UI on top of it that can display lists and text. But it had to be an email system first because you can't sell something that can do anything if it doesn't do anything.

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CobrastanJorji

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jandrese  19 days ago

I remember a long long time ago people used Filemaker Pro for all sorts of small data driven applications. I used to think stuff like that would be the future of computing, but instead Filemaker Pro faded into obscurity and most people just use Excel for those kinds of problems now. Or worse, the problem is solved in a clunky and fragile way with outrageously expensive Peoplesoft/Workday/Salesforce type solutions.

codingdave  19 days ago

That is kind of how it went, but there was more than email in its early days. Email existed, but Lotus also sold a separate email product. The rumors at the time ('94) were that Lotus was going to remove email from Notes and focus on apps. But instead IBM bought both and merged them. It got kinda lost from there, while also getting way bigger, but that is a different story.

Even so, it did have some app templates that came with it back in those early days - a helpdesk ticketing system, a sales CRM, discussions. I forget what they all were, but there was definitely a base of examples aside from email for people to start with.

PaulHoule  19 days ago

I spent about two years in early development of a "Zombocom" product and one question on my mind was "Whatever happened to Lotus Notes?" Superficially it seems the time is right for a rapid development platform for web apps based on an object database with synchronization support. I was sharply divided about the role of email in such a product:

I became a qmail fanatic around 1999 and enjoyed running a smart mail server but as we got into the early 2000's I experienced a series of crises involving worms, viruses, malware, spam, deliverability and such. Today I want nothing to do with running a mail server! It's not a problem where you can just invest once and it is done but instead it is like one of those service games.

I like the idea of email as a paradigm for asynchronous workflows, and if you're doing business by email (as in CRM) it is useful. On the other hand today the email market is pretty tied up with the likes of Gmail and Outlook

  • evntdrvn  19 days ago

    I worked at Seagate in the early 2010s, and they made pretty intensive use of Lotus Notes across the company—-it was pretty dang cool to see how sophisticated/useful the internal applications were that non-“developers” created!

FuriouslyAdrift  19 days ago

That's HCL Notes, now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

kragen  20 days ago

I have the vague memory that it was a distributed reimplementation of PLATO Notes, which had otherwise similar capabilities but was born as a bug tracking system?

  • OhMeadhbh  18 days ago

    It was more of a message board. I mean, I guess you could use a message board as a bug tracking system, but most of the uses I saw were more groups of people planning things... graduation parties, keggers, jam sessions, etc.