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After 23 Years, IBM Sells Off Lotus Notes (techcrunch.com)
"IBM has agreed to sell select software products to HCL Technologies," writes Slashdot reader virtig01. "Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool, Lotus Notes and Domino." TechCrunch reports: IBM paid $3.5 billion for Lotus back in the day. The big pieces here are Lotus Notes, Domino and Portal. These were a big part of IBM's enterprise business for a long time, but last year Big Blue began to pull away, selling the development part to HCL, while maintaining control of sales and marketing. This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house. As for HCL, it sees an opportunity to continue to build the Notes/Domino business. "The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets," C Vijayakumar, president and CEO at HCL Technologies, said in a statement announcing the deal.
Windows is finally done
These idiots can't decide what they want to be. Lotus Notes? Jesus...I thought that piece of crap died off years ago.
Not much fits within their "make money, not stuff" vision anymore. They'll be selling mainframes next, but probably keep research for a while, to generate more patents, until they run out of Chinese grad students. Then they'll just coast the rest of the way out.
In a previous incarnation the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster. I think IBM is very lucky to palm this off to get $1.8 billion for it after paying $3.5 billion those many years ago. Good work, IBM. I wonder how much they lost over the years trying to maintain it.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
At least they bought Lotus this time instead of their usual partner with the company and then waste it's resources till it's dead.
Real shame just the same. Lotus 123 was a much nicer spreadsheet than excel, their word processor wasn't bad not up to word but it could have been, and notes was far more powerful than Exchange right up to the early 2000s. Be interesting to see what the new owners do with it, I am betting on them mining the existing customer base hard. Once you are on Notes, it's very difficult to get away from it.
But it was a really interesting platform for building cryptographically secure document management systems.
Email was just one possible application that could be built on that platform; you could also build things like blogging and content and distributed, cooperative workflow management systems on it, complete with strong encryption and cryptographic authentication, including robust features like trust revocation and certificate signing delegation. And this was back in 1990, when people were using Windows 3.0. Active Directory was still ten years in the future, but it was feasible to deploy a system with tens or even hundreds of thousands of users using Notes even then.
This was also a time of exponential growth in computer adoption, and there were chronic shortages of people with even basic administration skills. It took green administrators weeks of training to learn the basic concepts in crypto and distributed directory management before they could operate even a basic Notes installation,yet Lotus and later IBM tried to position it against Outlook and Exchange.
It didn't help that Lotus never got its head of its ass when it came to UX, nor did it ever really do a good job of explaining to people the vast scope of collaboration management applications that could be built on Notes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow. They sold them. I'm so... indifferent.
"Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool, Lotus Notes and Domino."
Saying Notes and Domino are everyone's favourite email tools is like saying syphilis and gonorrhea are everyone's favourite STD.
(Yes, I know it was meant sarcastically, but that's roughly what Notes and Domino equate to).
I have used Lotus Notes. Unfortunately. It was THE worst mail interface and groupware suit I have ever had the misfortune to use.
I talked to one of the original Notes creators once. Notes was brilliant, it's just that people didn't understand it. Everything in it was just the way it should be, it wasn't the Notes creators fault that everyone else was an idiot and didn't appreciate their fine design. That was roughly their attitude towards their users. It was like talking to a schizophrenic who tried to convince you to live in his world, and was convinced that that was the only way that was right. Even within IBM they never integrated, they staunchly maintained their not-one-of-us culture.
Remember it was originally designed to handle the CIA's email back in the 1980s. It had strong encryption, distributed directory management, digital signatures, distributed certificate management, and a host of other capabilities that were decades ahead of its time.
Every time you received a Notes email (or indeed any kind of document) from another Notes user, it was automatically authenticated; no imposture was possible, and this was at a time when it was normal for SMTP to accept any input from any source that knew the IP address. At the time I was training people on this new email thing, and I'd open up a telnet session to the server and show them how I could forge an email from "The Lord God Almighty" with the subject line "Don't believe anything you read here."
Notes was never a bad email system. It had a very awkard client UI and a server that requried a more than room temperature IQ to administer, but you got things in return that people in the 90s didn't understand to be important yet. Things like two factor authentication and local encryption. If you lost your laptop. the data in Notes would result in a data breach. People still haven't figured out how to prevent that in a way that is affordable and simple to use and administrate. So while it was inexcusable that they never hired some HCI experts to clean up the archaic user interface, you still got a very modern set of capabilities all the way back in 1990s. People were frustrated with the complexity, but to be fair while Notes was asking you to handle things like generating and signing crypto certificates, you didn't even have the option with anything else back when it was introduced.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm amazed and slightly nostalgic that such a horrible and unfashionable product can still be mentioned on a tech site, wow! What this this mean for the remaining twelve users?!!
"it was automatically authenticated; no imposture was possible"
It used to be that if you had the Exchange admin password, you could send from any other user's e-mail address.
I know it was possible in Exchange 5.5 and 2000. No idea if it's still possible (unlikely) and if not, when it was changed.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Already, the Slashdot post today has been overflowing with the complaints of the nay-sayers who never participated in a successful and productive deployment in an organization. I pity their glee.
Au Contraire, Mon Ami. Domino/Notes was...in the right hands, a very valuable tool for many companies and organizations. I had literally dozens of happy corporate clientele during my Domino/Notes consulting era, because with the right objectives and roll-out it made a powerful tool organizations (usually the larger of those) could use to improve revenues and lower costs. Some of those companies are still using it to this day, and will rue having the owner (and therefore, support, off-shored to India, where good products can sometimes go to die).
When it was deployed in haste, and everybody got it all at once in a large corporation, it was usually a catastrophe, largely because Lotus, (and even worse, IBM) didn't bother to create an infrastructure AROUND Domino/Notes, and did a relatively poor job of inspiring the cadre of people like me who actually understood the possibilities (although they did give me a lot of leads that led to the success of my consultancy).
My strategy was simple: DO NOT ROLL IT OUT TO THE BUSINESS. Show them proof, from other companies, so that one small corner of the large corporation could grasp the benefits, and have it deployed properly, to fit a business need and show a benefit to both users and the corporation. It was NOT an "email system," although it had a eMail as part of its' core...a rather good one, that was easily adopted by novices.
My strategy, developed at DuPont (my first major client) was to find one business unit that was vital to corporate revenues, but having trouble, or excessive costs. An example: One division was hidebound with obsolete, incompatible array of products that people hated to use because it was easier to pick up the phone a make a call; that didn’t require a few days’ of learning time in a fast-moving organization. We replaced their incompatablities with ease of use through feature integration, and they suddenly turned to the new tools with glee. Another application was for all the far-flung Production Managers, who came back to Wilmington (Delaware, corporate HQ) to share solutions to production line efficiency...a couple of times a year. We gave those worldwide employees Notes clients and put the Server in Wilmington, and they began to solve problems more quickly and efficiently (often in days, instead of waiting months), and the results paid for the first years' adoption for the two original projects, including training and the usual unanticipated start-up costs, and showed a net profit. In the second year, other business unit managers were CLAMORING for the Domino/Notes solution; we sorted through them and declined about half, and the other half were successfully served. As of 1995, I know most of them were still being happily relied upon as a problem-solving aid.
The IBM purchase of Lotus was good for the investors, but IBM stopped evolving it when they bought it. There were the usual updates & versions, of course, (to keep the revenue flowing) but no real effort to broaden the market (e.g., to corporations with far-flung offices, or mid-sized companies verging on growth into the Big Leagues). Once all the major corporations to whom they catered were served, it was just a "maintenance" market, insofar as I could see.
It will be interesting to watch the acquiring company's sheparding of the product. Will they rely on updates and consulting to existing customers, or will they actually re-scale versions of the products for new markets that are emerging, rather than rely on the revenue from maintenance upgrades? There are large swathes of corporations in the $100M-to-$1B market that could be served, if they choose to revitalize the talent that is still out here, many of whom have long ago retired, and been replaced by people who still need to bridge the "Knowledge Gap" between extant technology and
> Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool
And *this* is why the whole thing failed.
Notes was *never* an email system, it has always been as fairly decent groupware system with a rather crappy email application built on top of it. I suspect, had Lotus (or, later, IBM) totally ditched the email side of it, then then maybe people would have realised what market it was actually meant to serve. Then it *might* have had a chance of success.
Well said, I have no points so I'm modding you up with my mind.
Lotus Notes was built for business administration more then End User functionality. It was one of these tools that worked well (at the time) in Large institutions, but became a huge headache for smaller companies, and god help you if you had it for your home PC
It took a while for Outlook to get a hold in the business market, it took some maturity in Exchange before the big businesses can get conned into using it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unfortunately this attitude was common during that time. Having been a software engineer myself, I understand that feeling, you put in a lot of work and focus on trying to make something so perfect, getting it to do everything that everyone says it wants. Only to have created something so complex that the end users actively avoid. Sure you can use this application no problem, but it like trying to explain a dream to someone else. It makes so much sense to you until you try to get someone else to figure out such madness.
As I have matured in my career I had grown to a point where I have to say No to a lot of development requests. Not because they are bad ideas or I am unable to program them. But because it would add complexity to the program that would become a sliding scale of bringing a product into becoming unusable. A lot of younger developers don't get it yet, and get confused when I OK a complex change to a product while reject a simple one. Mostly due to having experience with a full life cycle of a product, and I know what type of changes would become a rabbit hole of pain.
Notes was one of those early Windows GUI applications, so there was little experience with development for that platform, so the Notes design was innovated and brilliant and solved all the problems it was suppose to solve. However it was too much to what people actually really wanted, and most of these "stupid" people actually just had different sets of priories and interests, and never really wanted to dedicate a few weeks on learning a new product, where they only wanted to send email.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Consider that the product has value because it has a customer base which HCL believes is locked in enough that they can milk it for at least $3.5 billion.
... under American jurisdiction will upload your mails to servers in at least three countries... U.S., India and China. This means that your so called "private mail server" isn't private.
That said, I can't see this being an intelligent decision.
In every single course I hold on security, when the topic of enterprise e-mail services comes up, I nearly choke and laugh at whoever says something this stupid.
We use cloud for e-mail. That's it. Security for e-mail requires worldwide mass economy. That means that in order to properly identify threats in email requires scanning for anomalies that can only be detected when scanning on a mass economy scale. This allows patterns to be established and allows the threats to be identified by following the patterns of the senders, the servers, etc... the content itself isn't that interesting really.
Then comes stupid products like Cisco's Email Security Appliance. Don't get me wrong, the product really does work... but in order to work, it requires sending all mails that don't match specific hashes to a central location to be identified and managed on a mass economy scale. This means that spam and marketing and all that crap will be detected within reason, but all the mails you had hoped to keep private will be uploaded to Cisco to be scanned and identified. This means that an American company
Yes of course you have the option to not upload unknown mail... but about 99% of all real e-mail threats today will go undetected if they don't participate in the mass economy. As such, running something like ESA/IronPort is an absolute waste of money and time.
So... you simply should never run your own e-mail server anymore. There's no benefit or profit. So far as I know, all online e-mail services have enterprise migration solutions from Lotus available.
Oh... then there's another major reason to NEVER consider hosting your own e-mail. Governance. If you're hellbent on keeping you mail private, you're an idiot. By keeping your mail on cloud services, then you can never be accused of destroying e-mail. If you're an honest tech person... you wouldn't get this. But if you're a wall street banker, there's a 99% chance that at some time during your career, you'll be probed for suspicious activity. Using a service that maintains years of e-mail backups that can even recover deleted mails is a really good idea. In fact, it should be legally required... especially in governments and banks.
Then we talk about groupware stuff.
Well this is 2018... who the hell uses enterprise groupware?
I mean really, even if you have sharepoint and notes, almost no one in your organization is using it. They're using the latest and greatest online service instead. Slack, Teams, etc... In fact, they probably are using 10 of them. I've received at least 10 e-mails this year about the new official cloud platform for collaboration in the company... yep... 10 mails... all different ones.
So that leads me to the final possibility. Offline networks.
This includes military, oil networks, etc... NATO for example has their very own offline internet alternative. And the oil and fish markets also have this.
So... I can't imagine HCL keeping that business. Let's be honest, the Chinese government might be actively invading the U.S. through spying and such... this we can deal with. But India is a country where almost all modern scams originate. This means that the government doesn't have enforced regulation in place to deal with dishonest dealers. While India has over a billion people and probably over a billion good and honest people... there's always a percentage of opportunistic assholes ruining it for everyone. This is why we need laws... and I simply don't trust India's government... "Hello this is Windows Support... you have a virus" anyone? They were an organized and
Sure, Lotus Notes was great! .ID files were fucked up security problems waiting to happen
Well, aside from the fact that things like Agents and views were objects in the same database tables as the messages, which meant that any processing of messages had to be capable of also processing any agent that decided to appear...
Or the fact that Lotus Notes documents had limited sizes on their fields, including such problems as not allowing any more than a few KB of data without a line break or the entire message would crash the DB.
Or the fact that support of alternate character sets was late to appear, and very limited then. The number of times I had to base64 encode something because Notes couldn't process it... which meant running into field size and continuous character limits...
Oh! Almost forgot - the incredibly poor performance of processing in databases with tens of thousands of documents. I mean, simply listing the contents might take minutes for a DB located on the local box!
The encryption was weak as hell, unless you ran your own.
Plenty of folks have mentioned the GUI issues.
Sure, back in 1990, Notes and Domino had great features and decent performance. The problem was that they barely changed in the next 30 years, to the point I can sit at a Notes client from 1995 and still know where everything is - because it hasn't changed! Well, except to be ported into piss-poor Java...
I hate Lotus Notes. I HATE Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes is a horrible piece of garbage, and after a decade of developing for it, I hate it with the passion of a thousand suns. Let it and its creators burn in hell, where they might feel a fractions of what the people forced to work with it had to go through.
captcha: compost
If you are the admin, you can trivially give yourself âsend as userâ permissions.
As I have matured in my career I had grown to a point where I have to say No to a lot of development requests. Not because they are bad ideas or I am unable to program them. But because it would add complexity to the program that would become a sliding scale of bringing a product into becoming unusable.
That's a big issue in particular with open-source stuff, it's not your users who are idiots who need to be brought around to your way of thinking, it's you who have created something that may be fine for you but it's nearly unusable for an outsider. A prime example of this was a well-known OSS video editing suite that a friend of mine, a 2D compositor with decades of experience, told me about. The alternatives were five-figure commercial products, but this suite was doomed to be a permanent also-ran because the devs were absolutely determined to keep doing it their way, which was different from how every other suite in the industry did it. They would argue till they were blue in the face that their way was perfect (it wasn't, it was just different), but couldn't see that by choosing to be incompatible with everything else in the entire industry they were dooming themselves to irrelevance, or at least lack of any mainstream adoption.
Domino and Notes where a groupware distributed database engine which made it great for some applications -- any kind of database really and it was an integrated environment with replication engine, UI, workflow, and data all combined. It was a generic groupware platform/engine and they implemented an email system on top.
Outlook actually had this sort of thing too - Outlook Forms. However, Microsoft recognised that all this complexity and the trade offs for having a generic platform with email/calendar/contacts built in that made for too many compromises - and the market just didn't care for the generic platform.
So, MS optimised Outlook/Exchange for email / calendar and sort of plasted over/hid the generic interface. It does still sort of linger on (the occasional add on will give custom outlook forms), and you will get some addins adding their own metadata (e.g., online meeting systems adding their own ID to a calendar invite).
MS also recognised SMTP's supremacy - seriously, these systems started with their own email protocols. Notes had gateways that convert SMTP to its own stuff, and HTML Notes, but that just never really worked and looked ugly. And ugliness mattered. MS on the other hand, realised and moved to SMTP entirely - Outlook now defaults to HTML format for example. (You CAN still use the Outlook "rich text" format if you want to, though.)
The market has generally moved on to centralised web based applications instead of groupware platforms.
Ah, yes... kinda like Apple's old advice: you're holding it wrong.
I was a Lotus Notes user with my previous employer and it wasn't terrible to use. Just different from every other mail interface out there.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Notes was the wiki, but well over 10 years before the wiki was invented.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It was THE worst mail interface and groupware suit I have ever had the misfortune to use.
Now I wonder if any folks around here are old enough to have used the old IBM mainframe email system called PROFS. The thing was later rebranded as OfficeVision . . . and then they tried to port it to PCs as OfficeVision/2 . . . oh, which ran . . . or didn't . . . on OS/2.
Yeah, I'm sounding like the Monty Python "When I was a lad we lived in a cardboard box by the side of the road" guy.
I found it amusing that when IBM bought Lotus, they added the "lightning bolt" icon . . . that was normal on SNA 3270 "snorkel" terminals.
More interesting on this story, is that IBM appears to be bailing out on the "Social/Collaborative" market.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Funny, that. "Send as user" was trivially easy, but actually reading a user's email wasn't.
Case: I was asked by management to spy on a user's email so they could confirm suspicions that she was doing naughty things. After making sure that management understood the implications, and getting the directive in writing, I proceeded to configure exchange to echo said user's email to a journal. Well, it would have been easier to reset her password, sign on as her, and put an auto-forward rule on her mailbox. Exchange is *not* an easy system to administer. Powerful and sophisticated, yes, But not easy.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
It's the developers too, they need to show on their resumes that they worked on something "innovative". They need that bullet point otherwise they won't get that next job. Who cares if it works? The users find it incomprehensible? Screw them!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's the developers too, they need to show on their resumes that they worked on something "innovative".
They didn't need a resume any more since they were working for Lotus. They had now reached perfection.
I'm only half-joking when I say that...
I really dreaded using Lotus Notes. What an unpleasant experience it was.
I spent a year developing on it, and that was in the early 90s. Remember, this was in the age of segmented memory models, so limited field sizes were pretty much universal. Handling any structure larger than 64kb was ridiculously complicated under the covers. The 80386 supported a flat memory model as early as 1985, but it'd be ten more years before there was Windows OS support for that (except under NT, which nobody ran on their client workstations).
So by the time it was possible to fix the limitations of Notes, it had already lost out in the market to Outlook and Exchange. Lotus put its efforts into modernizing it's flagship 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and slapped some half-assed. UI changes on top of Notes. But it never got the major overhaul that every major piece of software needed in the transition to 32 bit and beyond, nor did it track rising expectations in the UX area.
Still, the basic security architecture of the system beats most stuff that's out there today.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A lot of younger developers don't get it yet, and get confused when I OK a complex change to a product while reject a simple one. Mostly due to having experience with a full life cycle of a product, and I know what type of changes would become a rabbit hole of pain.
You then go on to explain your reasoning to them, right? Even if it only gets through some of the time, the world will be a little better place.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Meanwhile, the friggin' US State Department expects you to submit documents using a Lotus-based form while the rest of the world uses Acrobat.
This is a good thing as HCL has already been programming for IBM for years and they had taken over development for Notes and Domino recently, IBM had been slow on development with domino/notes for years due to their main focus on Cloud computing, which they tried with Notes/Domino in Bluemix, however that didn't quite work out and a lot of IBM's Notes/Domino customers didn't want to move Notes/Domino to the cloud. HCL has already added Node.js to Domino 10 and they are redoing the client . We've switched off Notes email just this year and that wasn't even due to employee's wanting a change, It was mostly due to one of the higher ups wanting Office 365, though I hear quite a lot of complaints about Office 365 from the actual people who use it with applications everyday . Yes there are companies that still have 10's of thousands of IBM Notes applications, though I know not very many companies these days still use it. I"m sure we'll switch off of it eventually but with hundreds of applications it's not the easiest thing to do when your a small shop.
I must demur. Opening up Domino/Notes to public attempts to "improve" it would lead to multiple spins-off that would never improve on the original. The issues that need to be addressed are HUMAN, not Technological; Managerial, not inherent in the software. Only some organizations are capable of profitably deploying the extant product...the failures of the product have, in my experience, largely trying to fit the product into a semi-dysfunctional (and/or rigid) institution and environment.
Domino/Notes has always been appropriate to those environments where management is willing to change to succeed, and that principle is appreciated by lower management. Corporations that are focused on making executives rich generally have not found Domino/Notes improved their prospects. Corporations focused on the satisfying CUSTOMER's needs have generally found Domino/Notes a way to enrich those goals, in my experience.
Inflexible corporations that tried to bend Domino/Notes to their existing business models generally failed, and I refused to consult to those companies, for I knew it to be a waste of time. Flexible corporations, eager to develop projects that improve customer's desires and needs, were good fits for Domino/Notes. You can't fix a broken corporate structure with software; the corporate must be agile and flexible for Domino/Notes to be a success...and that kind of corporation then succeeds as well in the bargain.
I have, over the years, searched in vain for a successful Domino/Notes deployment that transformed the human behaviors from self-centered to customer-centered. I'd be pleased to hear of any you may know of.
HCL was already improving Notes/Domino as they were contracted by IBM to do so, also they were doing active development for other IBM products. In Asia, Europe, Africa, Middle East still have a lot of Business's using Domino/Notes. State Farm still has 10's of thousands of Notes Applications. A lot of companies have dumped Notes Email but there are companies that still have Notes applications and have tried and failed to find something else to put them in, etc https://www.redpillnow.com/a-n... https://prominic.net/2018/12/0... https://www.ibm.com/blogs/coll...
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Back around 2000 I was working as a PC technician for a Fortune 500 company. We had Notes 4.6 deployed when a particularly nasty virus hit (back in the good old days of Windows 98, I don't think our workstations had NT or 2000 yet). I remember reading the news about companies being brought to their knees by this virus (Melissa?) that were using Outlook/Exchange. Domino never had the same problems with it and we only had a handful of workstations hit and it never spread. For all its ugly ugly UI and UX problems, the backend of Domino was super powerful and secure. I got my first development experience on Domino working on Java and XML for the first time (I don't think JSP was around yet). I wish IBM hired some real UI/UX experts to turn it into something the masses would use. Oh well.
Funniest thing I've read all day!
You need to put this in context. When Notes/Domino first came out; it was a great product! You have to compare it to what was out at the time. IBM, internally was on Profs, (which was a green screen program, but still hands down one of the best email clients of all time). Now on the PC, for the corp. world, you had Word Perfect Office, CC Mail and MS Mail. They were all pretty darn bad! Lotus comes out with this awesome application that doesn't just do mail, but you can easily write real world, large scale apps in (in today's parlance it would be this Document/NoSQL database and all the RAGE). Now, they may not have been the prettiest apps in the world, but Domino kicked off a legion of Notes developers.
Also, Ray Ozzie is a genius. The Domino Multi-master replication scheme was light years ahead of it's time! It still is! I wish Ray open sourced this code. MS can't even get Sharepoint to replicate properly in 2018. The security stance was also decades ahead of it's time. No other product had the ability to do secure mailbox provisioning.
IBM has done what this did with so many other products. Bought a great product and killed it. IBM market share is going to be under $100billion soon, while MS and Apple are reaching a trillion. Imagine this product in the hands of a nimble, forward thinking startup? I'd bet it still be a dominant platform today. (Don't get me started on their Quickr and other epic fail SW, but again this is IBM and not Lotus or Ray.)
Here's the kicker, I wasn't even a Notes/Domino fanboy at the time, but realized the amazing power and features of the product when I saw it. I wrote programs that Global Fortune 100 company operations relied on day to day. I've also seen consulting companies come in and try to 're-write' these applications and went down in flames because they couldn't handle the global replication required. (But they had prettier screens) (Note this time frame is appx. 15 years ago)
What's super sad is that I'm at a company that STILL uses Lotus Notes, and OMG does the interface just suck balls. It's hard to explain how bad it is.