> Having limited liability through some kind of corporation can be nice.
I think this is the main point and benefit of the whole thing. It can be difficult and/or expensive to set up a limited liabilty company in many countries; as an e-Stonian, it's apparently cheap and simple.
I suppose there is one possible rather significant benefit, depending on where you live. If you're going to be an independant contractor, a freelancing "gun for hire", you may want a corporate entity to be your front: As a sole proprietor[1], you'd be personally liable for all your business liabilities -- debts, as well as, say, prosecution. A joint-stock company[2], OTOH, is a legally independent entity, that carries its own assets and liabilities independent of the stockholders. So "as a business", you'd perhaps want not to "be yourself", but rather "be" a joint-stock company.
Those can, AIUI, in many countries be hard, bureaucratic, or expensive to set up. The great advantage of Estonian "electronic residency" (again, only AIUI) is that it enables you to easily and cheaply set up an Estonian "electronic stock company", which might not be so easy and cheap where you live.
It's not just about "charging"; it's about shielding.
But fortunately, you're not one of those idiots who immediately jump from that to the conclusion that "This article must be written by an AI!" — right...?
> At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
The future, and mainly from the past: In the literal sense, it was derived from a mainframe application -- but above all, it carried with it that anti-personal centralised philosophy.
But yeah, from the future too: That's where we are (and have been for a good while now) headed back to, with all this "cloud"[1] stuff. The erstwhile PC is well on its way to becoming just a terminal again.
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[1]: There is no "cloud"; it's just other people's computers.
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.
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[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.
So what? A big piece of rock costs much less than half as much as an engine. Are you going to start putting big pieces of rock into your cars in stead of engines now, mr Ferrari Boss? No, of course not -- big pieces of rock suck at propelling a car forwards (or backwards, for that matter), compared to engines.
And in just the same way, touch controls suck at controlling them, compared to good old clicky-feely mechanical switches. Replacing mechanical switches with touch controls is almost as dumb as replacing engines with big pieces of rock.
Sheesh... (OK, maybe I'll actually go read TFA now.)
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ETA: OK, done. Apologies to Mr Vigna, not his fault, good for him that they're fixing it. But... The mere fact that there is something to fix shows they did fuck up on this in the past, so apply the above to the previous mr Ferrari Boss(es?).
You seem to be making the same error as many make about natural evolution: Assuming it does anything "to" anything, that it has a purpose. That's not how it works; it just happens.
Maybe called the "teleological fallacy" or something.
I think this is the main point and benefit of the whole thing. It can be difficult and/or expensive to set up a limited liabilty company in many countries; as an e-Stonian, it's apparently cheap and simple.
Any possible tax benefits are just a bonus.
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