Lotus Notes

» see lotus.com/notes as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

lotus notes was the kind of thing the corporate office had. i never had a corporate email account in the lotus era. my email through the late 1990s and early 2000s rotated between hotmail and yahoo, with a university pop3 account in the background after 2003. the people who used lotus notes were on payroll at large companies with a sysadmin in the basement and a dedicated mail server humming somewhere down the corridor. that was an entirely different shape of the internet, and from the dial-up consumer side it was mostly invisible.

lotus notes shipped in december 1989 from lotus development corporation, the company already famous for the 1-2-3 spreadsheet. the actual codebase came out of iris associates, the small shop ray ozzie ran in massachusetts. notes was not really an email client at the start. it was a groupware container in which email sat alongside replicated document databases that could sync over slow corporate wans. that replication model was the whole point. nothing else in the 1989 office could do replicated databases over leased lines.

ibm bought lotus in 1995 for $3.2 billion, mostly to get notes. by then the product had become the standard groupware for fortune 500 companies. the server side picked up the domino brand in 1996 when an http add-on shipped, which let any notes database become a website. by 1998 there were about 42 million seats in the wild, and that grew to a cumulative 140 million licenses by 2008. then ibm decided in october 2012 that the lotus brand had outlived its commercial usefulness and renamed the whole stack ibm notes and ibm domino. seven years later, in july 2019, ibm sold the entire product line to hcl for $1.8 billion. hcl is still developing it.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

notes was a strange piece of software to non-corporate users because the metaphor was wrong for what it did. a notes 'database' was not a sql database. it was a flat document store with weak typing, optimized for replication across slow wan links and disconnected laptops. each user had a local replica that could be modified offline and merged later, and the merge was conflict-tolerant in ways that nothing else on a 1990s desktop attempted. that property is the reason every large bank and consulting firm of the era ran notes, because the alternative was nothing. lotus had a real moat for about a decade.

the user interface was a different story. notes had a reputation for being hostile to ordinary office workers, with a labyrinth of nested folders and discussion threads that confused everyone who was not trained to use it. a long-running internet sub-genre of the 2000s was 'lotus notes is bad' blog posts written by people who had been forced to use it at work. the criticism was mostly fair. by the late 1990s microsoft outlook had a more familiar mail-first interface, and exchange did the basic mail-and-calendar parts of notes well enough that it departments started migrating away.

~ the long tail ~

the long tail is what makes notes interesting. ibm did not actually kill the product when it dropped the lotus brand. the renamed ibm notes kept shipping and kept getting installed at large institutions that had years of mission-critical workflows built on top of notes databases. when ibm sold the whole stack to hcl in 2019 for $1.8 billion, that was hcl betting that those institutions would keep paying maintenance for years to come. the bet has roughly worked. hcl notes is on version 14 as of the mid-2020s. somewhere in a basement of a regional bank, an old notes database is still being replicated overnight to a sales rep's laptop in another time zone, and that sales rep is still cursing it the way her predecessor cursed it in 1996.

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