I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
Ahm, it didn't. I mean, yes it is actively dying but not quite there yet. In fact, where I work we still make good revenue offering consulting and even products for LND. I think this part at the end of the article sums it up well:
> Lotus Notes is now HCL Notes, and as far as I can tell HCL intends to just enjoy the revenue as long as legacy customers will pay them to keep Notes running.
Yes, there are, and I dare say, a lot of legacy customers still paying for LND. So it is dying, but not as fast as people tend to think.
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.
Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
> At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
The future, and mainly from the past: In the literal sense, it was derived from a mainframe application -- but above all, it carried with it that anti-personal centralised philosophy.
But yeah, from the future too: That's where we are (and have been for a good while now) headed back to, with all this "cloud"[1] stuff. The erstwhile PC is well on its way to becoming just a terminal again.
___
[1]: There is no "cloud"; it's just other people's computers.
> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
But fortunately, you're not one of those idiots who immediately jump from that to the conclusion that "This article must be written by an AI!" — right...?
I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
In my experience working with Notes over many years, it was a neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users who also used, for example, MS Office apps. Often, they were cosmetic things. But Notes enabled workflow applications like email on steroids; Microsoft leveraged all it could to displace Notes with Exchange and SharePoint, both IMO technically not as good as Notes in many areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.
I agree with everything but the UI part. I think it was on par with Office. I used both at the same time. This is if you are compering Outlook, the email client, with the email app in Lotus Notes. As Lotus Notes was much more than email client. I was just the other day talking about Lotus Notes and Outlook. Lotus Notes had 3 different ways to look for info, the most powerfull one being indexing the database. My friend was praising how good Notes search was vs Outlook that never seem to find anything.
Lotus Notes Supported Formulas, LotusScript and Java.
I've only ever used Notes as a mail client, at a company I did consulting work for decades ago, for most of the 00s. (Yeah, sure, we'd heard that it was more than an email client -- but what did we care, when we didn't use it for anything else?)
Based on that, I absolutely disagree with your take on the UI: It was slow, clunky, ugly, and confusing. That was probably a (the) large(st) reason why they switched to MS Outlook.
If that was the period UI you meant, you're just wrong. Either you must have meant something newer, or you've suffered, what's it called? I think there is a name for the phenomenon, having your expectations lowered to the level of what you're getting.
I ended up at IBM around the turn of the century. They bought Lotus and I was brought on to write lotus notes applications.
The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.
We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.
I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.
I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
my favorite part of lotus notes is the password scrambler that prevents people snooping over your shoulder to steal password, I implemented this on my front-end at unsandbox dot com you can test it on teh console page even without an account, the portal itself does not have accounts.
My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!) but the whole thing is a shame. Had they stayed in their lane with the product, it might still be alive and widely used today.
For that matter, had they invested in a web plugin that treated domino as a thin client server, they may also still be around today. Though load balancing would probably take a bit more work.
The PLATO connection is the best part of this piece.
PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967.
It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
When the Mac version came out, I was all over it. WordPerfect user at the time, but wird processing was king back then. It would freeze and crash and irritate me. But I loved using it. If anything, it made things interesting for us Mac users as our options to PC software were quite virtually nonexistent.
I worked on IBM GS's dedicated Linux team. Notes didn't have a native client, so someone made a secret IBM internal tool call `fetchnotes` - a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard.
It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 62.3 ms ] threadDomino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
Ahm, it didn't. I mean, yes it is actively dying but not quite there yet. In fact, where I work we still make good revenue offering consulting and even products for LND. I think this part at the end of the article sums it up well:
> Lotus Notes is now HCL Notes, and as far as I can tell HCL intends to just enjoy the revenue as long as legacy customers will pay them to keep Notes running.
Yes, there are, and I dare say, a lot of legacy customers still paying for LND. So it is dying, but not as fast as people tend to think.
edit: typos
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
¹ https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software
Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.
Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
The future, and mainly from the past: In the literal sense, it was derived from a mainframe application -- but above all, it carried with it that anti-personal centralised philosophy.
But yeah, from the future too: That's where we are (and have been for a good while now) headed back to, with all this "cloud"[1] stuff. The erstwhile PC is well on its way to becoming just a terminal again.
___
[1]: There is no "cloud"; it's just other people's computers.
San Francisco's school board still uses it: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public
(Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
Lotus Notes Supported Formulas, LotusScript and Java.
Based on that, I absolutely disagree with your take on the UI: It was slow, clunky, ugly, and confusing. That was probably a (the) large(st) reason why they switched to MS Outlook.
If that was the period UI you meant, you're just wrong. Either you must have meant something newer, or you've suffered, what's it called? I think there is a name for the phenomenon, having your expectations lowered to the level of what you're getting.
The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.
We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
It was SO fast to write things in Lotus Notes, that is crazy. I did it for 10 years.
It had some limitations, I don't recall them now, but basically you could do almost anything. You had to find a way.
But it was FAST to develop. It was crazy.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967.
It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.