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 think it's important to start by saying that using Lotus Notes only as an email client misses the bigger picture, as Lotus Notes was was so much much much more than that. IBM had thouthands of custom made apps running on Lotus Notes. I had built about 50 apps.
Also, you didn't mention when you used it. I worked with Lotus Notes from 1995 to 2010, and the experience really depended on the hardware available at the time. Once it was up and running, it performed just fine if you had enough memory. For example, I still have version 8.0.2 (from 2008) on my machine, and it uses roughly 13MB at idle and up to about 50MB depending on installed apps, which isn't much by modern standards. But back in 1995, when 8MB of RAM was common, if Notes took up 6MB, I can see how that would have been a real issue. In my case, my ThinkPad had 32MB, then 64MB, and even 192MB which is the moment I installed Windows 2000.
As for the UI, the email client was highly configurable. Honestly, I don't remember ever thinking that something like Netscape Mail or The Bat looked or any email client that I tried at the time looked better. I didn't use Outlook back then, so I can't compare directly, but if Outlook over the past decade is any indication, Lotus Notes was at least on par, if not better that it.
What's really surprising is that even today, Lotus Notes had features that many modern clients still lack. For example, you could select multiple emails and forward them all together in a single message. Simple, but incredibly useful, and not something you commonly see implemented even now.
> I think it's important to start by saying that using Lotus Notes only as an email client misses the bigger picture
No, it's not important to start with that. I already mentioned I (we, I and a few consultants) were consulting at a client company. Sure, they may have missed some "bigger picture", but that's on them. For us, the picture they presented to us was our entire picture of Notes: It was the email client they (and therefore we, on their systems) used.
Likewise for all their own employees: apart from the CxOs or whoever made the decisions on what software to use, and the top echelons of the IT department that presumably advised them on this, the rest were all just corporate end users who got to accept what they were given. The ones we worked closely (as in sharing an office) with in their BI department certainly didn't have any influence on (or seem happy about) the selection of the software installed on their corporate Windows desktops. As far as they (and therefore we) were concerned, that was the whole picture, frame and all, period.
> Also, you didn't mention when you used it.
Indeed I did: I said I was there ~"for most of the 00s". I am getting old, but it wasn't the 19-00s; I'm not that old! And the 21-00s haven't arrived yet, so take a wild guess as to which 00s I may have meant...
But yes, I admit that isn't exceedingly exact -- mainly because my memory isn't, either. And it did, I must also confess, leave you to do a bit of deducive thinking: I also mentioned something about how the crappy interface may have been the main reason they switched to Outlook. It wasn't mentioned explicitly, but how would I have known that they switched, if I hadn't been there to experience the change? So it was only for about the first half of my time there. I worked for this client company -- as an employee of no less than three[1] consulting firms -- from 2001 to about 2009, so I suffered from Notes e-mail from 2001 to, say 2004 or -05. (Maybe even -06?) Full-time.
> As for the UI, the email client was highly configurable. Honestly, I don't remember ever thinking that something like Netscape Mail or The Bat looked or any email client that I tried at the time looked better.
No large corporation I know of used those. Outlook (or whatever any predecessors may have been called) all the way. So, totally irrelevant comparison.
> I didn't use Outlook back then, so I can't compare directly,
And it shows.
> but if Outlook over the past decade is any indication, Lotus Notes was at least on par, if not better that it.
Nope. You've got the timeline bass-ackwards: Never heard about "the continuing enshittification of Microsoft software" that all the kids are going on about nowadays?[2] That hip term means shit is getting worse. Which in turn -- put on that deductive deerstalker again, Sherlock! -- means it used to be better, in the before times. The UI of the Lotus Notes email client I used in a corporate environment 2001-ca2005 was utter unbearable crap compared to Outlook of the same era.
But, given how you seem unable to comprehend all this after I'd already said it all in my previous comment because of the huge blinders you've got permanently attached to your head, I see nothing useful coming from continuing this discussion.
The only things I'll leave for you to take away from it (although I doubt you will), are these:
*: It doesn't matter how great Notes was as an architecture or a development environment. That's not what end users see, and end users are what determine[3] a product's success in the market. And what I, as an end user, saw in ~2001-2005 was not only a mainframe-based architecture, but basically a mainframe-based user interface.
*: Sure, that interface may have been cleaned up at some time. Your linked picture certainly looks rather OK -- but that's nothing like what I saw and had to use. Dunno if that's because your pic is from some later version, or because the client corporation I worked at deliberately hadn't updated and was using some older version. But that doesn't much matter: Even if they were on some older version from, say, the late 1990s... Isn't that pretty typical for corporations, hanging back a version or two[4]? By that time the battle had long been lost. Microsoft had spent most of the 1980s and all of the 1990s in conquering the desktop market, and Outlook had looked something like your pic from... Idunno, at least about 1990? Catching up to 1990 table stakes sometime around 2000 won't help you leapfrog anything. And remember, this was, as mentioned above, well before the deliberate enshittification cycle we're currently in had begun. The 1990s and early 00 decade of this century may well have been the peak years of MS Office usability. No f***ing way Lotus Notes of the time (or from a corporate update cycle earlier) could compete with that.
*: So your "architecture / development argument is irrelevant, and your "the UI caught up!" one is missing the time factor; catching up to where your competitor was fiften years ago isn't really catching up.
There, sorry, that'll be all from me on this.
___
[1]: I was employed at Oracle Finland from 2000 to 2005, at a small local outfit called ZenPark from 2005 to about 2007, when it got acquired by the much larger Finnish (briefly Scandinavian?) competitor Affecto, and therefore for Affecto (later swallowed up by CGI) from ~2007 to ~2010, when I left. That client gig had finally come to an end a year or two earlier, and the later ones I got were even less fun. The ZP-Affecto transfer was par for the course, with the acquisition, but the real miracle was Oracle allowing a colleague of mine, who transferred to ZP a while before me, to take his part of the gig with him. His precedent made it a cinch for me to follow in his footsteps.
[2]: Good morning, kids, welcome to the party... A decade or two too late, but nice of you to show up.
[3]: Sure, for corporate products it's often not actually end users' experience of actually using the product, but top management being bamboozled by marketing. But even C-suite managers use e-mail, so in this case they're end users too.
[4]: Well, at least it used to be. It's only sometime long after the turn of the century that the big software companies have to some extent succeeded in dragging corporate IT environments with them into the auto-updating software cycle that consumers have been stuck in for a long while already.
It's definitely true that they do not have access to the original OS/2 source - this has been confirmed by people from Arca Noae in various interviews/presentations I've seen. I've never heard a definitive explanation for why, but two reasons are usually speculated:
1) Due to the amount of third party code in OS/2 (most notably, the DOS and Win 3.x layer) that IBM is unable to license out the code, or unwilling to go to the trouble to figure out the legal implications.
As far as I know, yes. There were no changes made to eCS which required source - everything was implemented as drivers, or layers on top of the base OS.
I have not heard or seen any direct confirmation of this anywhere. If you have, I would really like to know. I am looking at a follow-on review and this would be great background info.
> most notably, the DOS and Win 3.x layer
I think what you put in parentheses here is the real reason.
IBM probably still has the source. It seems to be methodical, unlike say Symantec which lost the QEMM and DESQview source.
But IBM and MS co-developed OS/2. MS has joint ownership of this code.
MS has a 50+ year history of being a deeply dishonest and unreliable company. It hates FOSS and only releases what it has to. MS-DOS 4 only got out became someone found it and made it public.
Satnav Nutella has no more understanding of this than the Queen of England. He will do and say whatever is needed to make Number Go Up.
MS releases tiny token gestures to make the incomprehending loud FOSS advocates believe them. Notepad, Calc, ancient DOS releases... nothing that matters.
It won't release Windows 3 because some of that code is still in Windows today.
MS does not love Linux. WSL2 is an embrace-and-extend tactic. If MS had a real clue left then WSL1 would never have been a product: it would have just extended the NT kernel POSIX personality to run Linux binaries.
Remember the core of Windows is the NT kernel and it can natively run OS/2 binaries and Unix binaries.
It doesn't because MS turned it off. NT is a version of VMS with native Unix and OS/2 binary support and a GUI built on Windows 3 code and MS won't let that code out. If it did the ReactOS people could make a ReactOS that was Good Enough. The WINE people could make a seamless one that make .EXEs a 1st class Linux citizen.
MS is terrified of that because it doesn't have the skills to do the equivalent any more, and WSL2 is the existence proof of that. It couldn't even get systemd working in WSL2 until it hired Poettering to do it. Then he stayed there just long enough to get the money and he's off out again.
The reason IBM won't release the OS/2 source, even to Arca Noae, is Microsoft.
Also, around the 25 minute mark, Rosenthal points out that the Workplace Shell source code "no longer exists in one place anymore", so I do think that there are problems with finding all the source for the OS.
As much as I like the performance and the power consumption of the current apple lineaup, the problems is I can not install Linux on the Neo. I can beraly install it on the M1, M2, and M3. And not everything works. If I could install Linux and have everything working, I will buy a Macbook (not a Neo) right away.
Linux will always be a second class citizen on Apple hardware. I have the M1 and have tried Linux a few times at different stages of maturity. As it is right now, it's still a far cry from the experience of a Linux on x86 hardware, and specifically Thinkpads. Bottom line is, even though I really like my laptop, I do NOT like Mac OS (and with every update I like it _less_) and will probably go back to a thinkpad for my next laptop. It's a big shame.
A used ThinkPad with way more than 8 GiB of RAM can cost way less than $600. I picked two up for $300 each. You're not gonna run frontier open-source models on it but it's a very nice dumb machine for basic tasks, or even the archaic practice of programming by hand.
So you have become a reviewer instead of a programmer? Is that so? hones question. And if so, what is the advantage of looking a code for 12 hours instead of coding for 12.
Build features faster. Granted, this exposes the difference between people who like to finish projects and people who like to get paid a lot of money for typing on a keyboard.
Why does understanding computer science principles and software architecture and instructing a person or an ai on how to fix them require typing every line yourself?
Sure, you can do without them, but it will be much more difficult.
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