Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3 276
walterbyrd writes "In 2012, IBM started retiring the Lotus brand. Now 1-2-3, the core product that brought Lotus its fame, takes its turn on the chopping block. IBM stated, 'Effective on the dates listed below, [June 11, 2013] IBM will withdraw from marketing part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:' IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0. Further, IBM stated, 'Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after September 30, 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs.'"
How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.
I'd take PINE over either. And I don't even like PINE.
Re: (Score:3)
You probably want to use alpine.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd take PINE over either. And I don't even like PINE.
You mean Emacs, VI doesn't even- oh wait, wrong discussion.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Informative)
PINE was awesome for its time.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Insightful)
When my company was bought, the parent company, who uses Notes, put us on Notes. Two years later, we're still fixing issues with the migration. Nobody likes this POS and that includes people in the parent company who've been using it for years.
Re: (Score:3)
What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?
Genuinely interested.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate inertia.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?
Genuinely interested.
Employment of the notes experts and their boss.
NOTHING ELSE.
they can justify to keep using it by saying that it already has millions invested into it, even if switching to anything would be both cheaper for the next fiscal and less awful for users.
that's how it was at one corp. anyways.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?
They've fallen for the sunk costs [wikipedia.org] fallacy [logicallyfallacious.com]. If they were to change to something else, they'd be admitting that they made a poor decision in choosing Lotus Notes in the first place.
Your mistake is thinking that companies use rational thought processes when making decisions. An even bigger mistake is thinking that the people making the decisions are looking out for the best interest of the company, instead of their own best interests.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure... does your company keep track of IT exceptions using a Notes app?
Re: (Score:2)
We have this coming up in a few months after a very large and old French company bought our little aerospace company. If you were part of the IT transition team, please mail me so we can hear your horror stories.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not Microsoft.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was at IBM printing systems when they transistioned over to Ricoh. One universal item that cheered everyone up was the possibility of getting rid of Notes.. then, we found out that Ricoh used Notes.. was just cruel..
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
[DOCTOR WHO] I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. [/DOCTOR WHO]
Years back I worked for a company that was acquired and we were forced to go to Notes (from Outlook IIRC). I found Notes to be a very intelligent piece of software. Unfortunately, it wasn't a friendly kind of intelligence that helped you out. Instead, it seemed to be a malicious sort of intelligence that would make Notes get progressively harder to use the more you tried to be productive.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Informative)
Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.
Re: (Score:3)
Groupwise IMO was worse.. Far worse.
Re: (Score:3)
Email and Calendaring work very well in Groupwise. Notes....? How is it far worse?
Re: (Score:2)
Crashing clients, lost messages and since you mention it disappearing calendar events and worse yet, horrible support. I realize it's the only thing that's keeping that happy valley company alive but it sucked, probably still does. It's been about 8 years since I've worked with it and I avoid it like Democratic Fundraisers. It may have gotten better but I'll believe that when Barbara Streisand's nose gets smaller. There's a reason that Exchange has taken everybody's lunch money (although that's fading n
Re: (Score:3)
"Crashing clients, lost messages and since you mention it disappearing calendar events and worse yet, horrible support."
This is what we experience here with Outlook and Exchange.
Re: (Score:2)
...and Notes was a database design program disguised as a horrible groupware.
Was?
Re: (Score:2)
Can you elaborate on it's deficiencies? Some of us have never had the displeasure of using it.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot, and in fact the Internet as a whole, has neither the time nor storage to do that subject justice.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
My understanding is that "Notes" is really just the default public face of Domino Server, which is an enterprise-grade implementation of the Turing Tarpit: Anything is possible, nothing of interest is easy, and the corpses of lots of obsolete animals can be found lurking in the depths...
Re: (Score:3)
The failed Notes experiments can always be revisited by dropping some bad LSD. Or, in the case of John McAffee, some bath salts.
Notes was the best before IBM and Web (Score:2)
Lotus Notes was awesome before IBM bought it, and before the web seemingly made it obsolete. But replacements for Notes are only just recently appearing, such as Drupal and Joomla. That's right, what was called "groupware" back in the 90's is called CMS now. And Notes was decades ahead in terms of CMS back in the 90's. But then IBM bought it and its original vision was lost.
Re: (Score:3)
Are you insane? Drupal and Joomla replacements for Lotus Notes?
Let me guess, you also think that Adobe After effects is a good replacement for Microsoft notepad.
Drupal and Joomla are dynamic web page systems they are NOT CMS by any hope or stretch. Anyone trying to get normal corperate users to use those two are completely and utterly insane.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm.
Both Drupal and Joomla are very decent CMS systems.
The fact that they are very good at displaying and reporting that content via web browsers does not remove their ability to be a content management system.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't recall Lotus Notes pre-IBM having calendaring.
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.
From my experience with Notes, it is (apparently) impossible to configure and use the scheduling function in a way that improves group/department/team/business in any way. I'd get invited to dumb meetings, and just to be a smartass, I'd reply I couldn't make it and that the company truck would be attending in my place. Instead of being insulted or irritated with me, my colleagues and bosses would just assume that Notes had somehow screwed up my response and ask if another time would work better for me.
A waste of perfectly good passive-aggression.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember being switched to Notes long ago at some foreign-owned multinational I worked for. It was probably the worst IT experience in my entire life, bar none, and I have done my time in the IT department. Outlook and Exchange are a shining beacon of Hope compared to Notes, which says more about Notes than it does about Exchange.
Although, I have repressed most of my memories of it, I recall the email client itself simply missing features that you would have considered very basic in any email program.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.
No kidding. 1-2-3 dies and the abomination that's called "Notes" is allowed to live on. Tedious to use, painful to look at, the most powerful features usually not configured in a way to be useful. Die, Notes, die. Which of course is German for "The Notes, the.
Will they be open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Interesting)
If IBM no longer wants to support Lotus 1-2-3 (understandably so), then open-sourcing the code might be a nice goodwill gesture. This way, whatever archaic organizations still rely on this stuff can always go hire someone else to maintain it. IBM has traditionally been fairly supportive of open source, and this would be a good opportunity to contribute to it without losing anything of substantial financial value.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
+1 funny.
Re:Will they be open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It shouldn't be an option. If they refuse to sell or license it, it should be automatically put into the public domain.
Re:Will they be open-sourcing it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to see an abandonware law, too. For software, anyone applying for a copyright should have to put the source code in escrow, and it would be automatically released a certain period of time (say, 1 year) after the company stops selling it.
Re:Will they be open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Informative)
Good News: Currently IP law *is* abandonware. It sunsets the monopolies.
Bad News: It sunsets about as fast as a Venusian day
We obviously need to fix the latter, but fortunately the Founding Fathers new these things should be 'limited'.
Re: (Score:2)
So the ides of March 2015 then (accounting for support period)?
Re: (Score:2)
An abandonware law would be nice - we could get hold of the source code for previous Windows versions and have a good laugh.
Re:Will they be open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
While I support the spirit of the concept(it's kind of insane that software that is so commercially irrelevant that you can't even hunt somebody down and force them to take your money may still be under copyright until after most of us posting right now are dead), I suspect that such a law would, in practice, lead to a lot of 'on sale in name only' arrangements:
Using Amazon Glacier(just because they have a handy price sheet, not necessarily because they are the best), you can store seldom-accessed data for
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I like that Idea. If a Company has a product that it refuses to sell, license, update, support or any other option that allows people to continuing to use their product for whatever reasons; then, the Company should have two options:
A) Open Source
B) Placed in Public Domain without the Source Code.
The whole thing works itself out. If it's Open Sourced, people can make it better and have a alternative. If It's released freely without the Source, eventually usage of the product would halt as host Operating Sys
Re: (Score:2)
Copyright Act of 1790 (Score:2)
If the Copyright Act of 1790 were still in force, the first version of Lotus Notes 1-2-3 Millennium Edition from 1998 would have become public domain last year.
Re: (Score:2)
No can do.
Open sourcing the software would reveal the secrets of the technology behind their "uncopyable" install floppy disk.
Re: (Score:2)
then open-sourcing the code might be a nice goodwill gesture.
That also might make it very easy for malware writers to be able to find security holes in it. On the other hand, would malware writers even bother to target something that has such low marketshare?
Re: (Score:2)
Too Bad. (Score:2)
Lotus 123 use to be the main business spreadsheet, and combined with word perfect, you were ready for business.
But I guess DOS is now done.
Re: (Score:2)
When MS released its office bundle that included Excel, and Word for less than the price of either 1-2-3 or WordPerfect, it was the beginning of the end for those products -- the MS office was "good enough" for most users and the price was a real factor when you were buying for a corporation.
Re: (Score:2)
I've personally found gnumeric does everything I need. Makes it hard to take the "need" for commercial spreadsheet programs a little less convincing.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't just DOS, although that was its stronghold. There were also versions available for: Unix, Macintosh, Windows, and OS/2.
Hmm, didn't know this though: Lotus 1-2-3 [wikipedia.org]: "The charting/graphing routines were written in Forth [wikipedia.org] by Jeremy Sagan (son of Carl Sagan)"
I believe that reference to Forth should be, "the fabulous Forth language."
How about open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How about open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Opensourcing a project can be a pain in the ass (I work at a company that tries to opensource most of its infrastructure systems), what with internal assumptions, potential information leaks, and auditing for potentially licensed code that you're not allowed to release in its uncompiled form.
I don't see a ton of people out there clamouring for 1-2-3 to be opensourced, to be honest, other than people who are just reflexively arguing for opensourcing anything that's discontinued. I'm not saying that's a bad argument, but it's certainly a weak one, and I don't see IBM getting a particularly great ROI for doing the work to opensource 1-2-3.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see IBM getting a particularly great ROI for doing the work to opensource 1-2-3
unfortunately 'good will' doesn't usually factor into such calculations. There's plenty of benefit for IBM, just not financial.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody needs the code to 1-2-3. But it would be highly interesting to have the code to 1-2-3 1.0, because it would be fascinating to see how it was done on such limited platforms as original PCs. I had 1-2-3 1.0 on a PC-1 with 448kB memory — 384kB of which was on an ISA expansion card. Those were the days, I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
. . . "Symphony" . . .
...till Lotus won't run... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it's done.
not so much "done" as irrelevant. (Score:2)
It ain't done till Lotus won't run.
I guess it's done.
Interestingly, I think you're right, Windows is done. [letmebingthatforyou.com]
Re: (Score:2)
It ain't done till Lotus won't run.
I guess it's done.
Interestingly, I think you're right, Windows is done. [letmebingthatforyou.com]
ohnotheskyisfalling
People said the same thing after Vista, though as far as I can see, Windows 8 is far worse for end users than Vista.
Let's look back (Score:2, Offtopic)
The original /. (Score:5, Insightful)
Using / as the main way of navigating spreadsheets...
1-2-3 you gave me my start, not just in spreadsheets, but in computers. Thank you and goodbye, old friend.
Sniff.
Re:The original /. (Score:5, Funny)
Things are always remembered bigger then what they really were.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I had a machine with 8" floppies, but it wouldn't run lotus. It would run Wordstar, though. But I actually ran it on the machine with 5.25" floppies, because it actually worked. I would say Kaypro 4 forever, but obviously I got rid of that long ago
Re: (Score:2)
Not on IBM PCs but there were other brands out there that had the 8 1/2" floppy drives.. 5 1/4 was new-fangled stuff. I had a DEC Rainbow 100 with 5 1/4 and 8" floppy drives. The 8" was for DEC 10s and 20s for bootloader mods for the PDP 11/40 front ends.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot Lunar Lander...
I used to be a Student Admin on an HP 2000 in College. We spent our days getting rid of "Trek" programs because the Hard Drive was only 15MB.
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC, several of the Tandy/Radio Shack models came with 8" drives. I saw one circa '82, don't recall the model number.
Re: (Score:2)
8" were not used on PC's AFAIK... you mean the 5 1/4" ones.
While I've never seen a DOS computer with an 8" drive, but I've certainly seen single-user desktop CP/M systems with them, and that's technically a personal computer.
Re: (Score:2)
Incorrect. the origional IBM PC model 5150 had an option to be purchased with a 8" floppy drive. we had one as well as a "portable" 9" tape drive to read the data tapes sent to us from the master office with the new product line update.
Re: (Score:2)
God, it brings back memories: an 8086 with 256k of RAM, 8 1/2" floppies....
Using / as the main way of navigating spreadsheets...
1-2-3 you gave me my start, not just in spreadsheets, but in computers. Thank you and goodbye, old friend.
Sniff.
I remember SuperCalc, on my SuperBrain... CP/M, 64KB RAM, monochrome, two 160KB floppies, and one of them could fit the OS, Wordstar, Supercalc, DBase II and many other programs on it. And thank god for double sided floppies which required flipping of course. Yeah flipping floppies those were the days! ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Rest in peace, old friend.
Re: (Score:2)
For me it brings back memories of the cartridge-based Lotus 1-2-3 on the PCjr.
It's probably the only software for the PCjr I have that still works (other than the BASIC cartridge).
Lotus -- OpenOffice (Score:4, Informative)
Latest versions of Lotus brand suite were based on OpenOffice. Symphony was just the Lotus style shell over it. There was no native version for years. Anyway, it is interesting how IBM can walk away from products with arms... Hard drives, ThinkPads, now Lotus...
Re: (Score:2)
Symphony was just the Lotus style shell over it.
. . . so was anything said about Symphony in any announcement . . . ? Is that on the chopping block, as well . . . ?
OO support (Score:5, Informative)
The end of history (Score:5, Interesting)
The PC "killer application" (Score:4, Insightful)
And a tip of the hat to Context MBA (Score:2)
Oh, my, sic transit Gloria mundi. I don't think anyone ever called it "Lotus 1-2-3," it was just "Lotus..." nobody knew that or if Lotus had any other product. But let's also take time for a tip of the hat to the utterly forgotten Context MBA.
"Integrated software" was very much in the air then. In fact for many years, and contrary to popular belief at the time, Appleworks outsold Lotus 1-2-3, but was "invisible" because it was sold directly by Apple while the bestseller lists were compiled from sales by dis
Re: (Score:2)
"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64).
The
Slow memory bus in original PC (Score:3)
The Commodore 64's CPU ran at a mere 1 MHz, so it was hard to get decent speed on any kind of application or game unless you coded in assembly.
This was true of the IBM PC's 8088 CPU as well. Though it ran at 4.77 MHz, it spent so many of those cycles waiting for instructions and data to come back from RAM that it didn't really run much faster than the Commodore, Apple, and Atari micros in practice.
One of the first true memory-mapped display apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
that made skillful use use of reverse characters and color (oh how we loved those beautiful 80x24 8 color character displays... sigh) to create a working environment that was comfortable to be immersed in. A proposition with. Compared to everything else the data SNAPPED onto the screen. For many of us Lotus was the first application to deliver the experience of scrolling through data vertically and horizontally so smoothly you got an actual sense of movement, without that whole-screen redraw-flicker that we had come to tolerate from software.
Of course this wasn't the only fine memory-mapped experience. I give fond greets to Vector Graphic S-100 Systems and their wonderful word processor MEMORITE, whose line jumping word wrap as you type was so smooth and flicker-free professional typists took to it easily.
I used to maintain an S-100 system at a local attorney's office and they had awful problems with dust from their brick wall being sucked into the machines. I'd get a call from the secretary saying "Get over here quick! It's changing the spelling on the screen right in front of me again!" I'd ask, "Give me an example?" And she'd say something like "all the 'p' are changing to 't'."
So I'd show up and take down the system and remove the S-100 memory card full of 4k RAM chips in sockets, say to myself "okay, bit 2" and count over from the edge of the card and pry up, re-seat the appropriate chip. Then replace and test, all good now. Then I'd ask, "Would you like me to perform general maintenance and re-seat them all?" and She'd say "No -- we're in a hurry!"
Job security. Not a bad service contract gig for a 17-year-old.
Now that Microsoft has decided to adopt the UI... (Score:5, Informative)
Gee and just after Microsoft decided to adopt the silly flat tile User Interface paradigm too. You would think its popularity would surge.
Unintuitive interface... check.
Nothing works quite right... check.
Square confusing tiles in a grid... check.
It should be the Windows 8 standard!
Ami Pro ... loved it! (Score:2)
Die Notes (Score:2)
/ f x (Score:3)
C:\>
Good bye, Lotus. You deserve a lot of credit for helping computers catch on with businesses back in the early 80's. A lot of us owe our jobs to you.
Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard a similar slogan with "Windows" instead of "DOS", as well as variations with "WordPerfect" instead of "Lotus". The fact that the quote has so many variations, and that no one can seem to pin down who said it and when, makes me suspicious that the whole thing is an urban legend.
Did Microsoft engage in anti-competitive behavior? Absolutely. Did this typically involve trying to deliberately break user-space software? No. In fact, as Raymond Chen has repeatedly noted in his blog, a lot of effort went into making compatibility hacks so badly written software would still work on Windows.
The fact is that neither Lotus nor WordPerfect ever successfully managed the transition from DOS text-mode to Windows GUI. This is due to a lot of factors, including bad management; W. Pete Peterson's book Almost Perfect is unintentionally revealing of this, since it indicates how the WordPerfect company under Peterson treated its employees like crap. They thought that GUIs were a passing fad and that they could stick with text-mode forever. Sure, the fact that the Office development team could ask other people in the same company for support may have helped on the margins, but other companies were writing good Windows software at the same time. Lotus and WordPerfect just plain didn't bother trying.
Re: Lotus and Windows (Score:2)
The UI issues changed a lot between the DOS and Windows environments. Because there was a need to maintain the keystroke compatibility (partly necessary because of the way that some macro stuff worked) that compatibility became the focus instead of making a great windows UI. Of course with a huge installed base, it wasn't a tough decision to go in that direction.
Yes, I was there.
First there was 1-2-3, then R3 (which included an OS2 and IBM mainframe version), and then windows development started from ther
Re: (Score:2)
The quote came from making sure Windows didn't run on top of DR DOS.
DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run predates DR-DOS. The issues with Windows 3.1 on top of DR-DOS were a whole other thing. I was surprised they were actually affecting people since it really didn't make sense to run Windows on DR-DOS anyway. You'd run MS-DOS and MS Windows, or you'd run DR-DOS without any GUI (they provided a DOS task switcher with multitasking which was actually fairly decent) or you'd run Desqview. But apparently many people were quite incensed that Windows wouldn't run properly atop DR