Lotus Notes Indeed Sucks

I feel somewhat vindicated. There was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing happening at work today and as I perused the Internet I found a story about some jerk petitioning IBM to make Notes and Domino open source.

I usually try to stay away from the comment sections of news sites like Slashdot or Digg because they tend to just piss me off. I think they're dominated by students, academics, the unemployed, Mac and Linux fanatics, and other ne'er-do-wells, slackers, and agitators who don't actually have to make technology work in a large business environment. I do have a deep dislike for Lotus Notes and IBM in general though and a few emotion has gotten the better of me and I have been moved me to post comments on various technology news sites when a Lotus Notes topic appears. In the past though, my justified rancor has been met with counter posts extolling the virtues of that wretched product. Today though, the comments from other anonymous people on the Internet were mostly anti-Notes, and that felt nice.

On a mildly humorous note (no pun intended) I discovered that my company blocks Google searches for "Lotus Notes Sucks" (with the quotes), but not for Lotus Notes Sucks (without the quotes).

So why does Lotus Notes suck so much? Why does it arouse passionate ire in me? Here are a few reasons.

• The client sucks - It is very very slow and the interface is ancient and counter intuitive. And don't try to tell me the version 8 client fixes all that. It's still slow and it needs over a GB of RAM.
• Domino servers don't scale, but only big companies use it. Domino servers can only use 2 GBs of RAM. That's just silly in modern times.
• Notes "databases" don't scale, and suck in general. Performance sucks when they get over 2GBs, and since they aren't relational databases, it is more like a document collection, than a real database. It is like a pile of papers on the floor instead of papers in an organized filing cabinet.
• Notes "applications" and "databases" don't play well with others. Big companies end up with lots of data in crappy notes apps that should be in a real database. It makes it hard to get the data out and do anything with it in any reasonable amount of time.
• Notes and Groupware in general encourages rampant amateur development. "Almost anybody can make an application" sounds cool, but then 10 years later you have hundreds of poorly written Notes applications with unknown dependencies, some of which are business critical, and which were designed with no forethought for future size and complexity (see the "doesn't scale" complaints).

I'm sure I am leaving out lots of stuff. I'm going to avoid the temptation to take on IBM in general.