livius drusus
02-10-2006, 06:25 PM
How can a program be so bad, yet thrive? (http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1705106,00.html)
The panoply of interface errors raises two questions. Why do users hate Notes so much? And why, then, do they use it? The answers illuminate a typical process when companies buy "enterprise" software: the people who choose a product tend not to be the ones who use it.
As one of the long-suffering victims of Lotus Notes' horrendous interface and unbelievably clunky back end, I just could not agree more.
One example of the horror, the horror from my experience is when the company upgraded to Notes 6.5. They committed to it completely, rolled it out to hundreds of offices, only to find that it was such a resource hog that people had to click, go get some coffee, have a little chat with the receptionist, gaze out the window dreamily, and mosey on back taking their own sweet time, just to open the damn thing. Once it was open, good luck trying to work on anything else, especially a spreadsheet of any size.
For 6 months they let people "work" like this, until finally enough high-powered types bitched about it that the IT decision makers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doubling the RAM of every single computer in the company. It was unspeakbly stupid in every possible way.
The panoply of interface errors raises two questions. Why do users hate Notes so much? And why, then, do they use it? The answers illuminate a typical process when companies buy "enterprise" software: the people who choose a product tend not to be the ones who use it.
As one of the long-suffering victims of Lotus Notes' horrendous interface and unbelievably clunky back end, I just could not agree more.
One example of the horror, the horror from my experience is when the company upgraded to Notes 6.5. They committed to it completely, rolled it out to hundreds of offices, only to find that it was such a resource hog that people had to click, go get some coffee, have a little chat with the receptionist, gaze out the window dreamily, and mosey on back taking their own sweet time, just to open the damn thing. Once it was open, good luck trying to work on anything else, especially a spreadsheet of any size.
For 6 months they let people "work" like this, until finally enough high-powered types bitched about it that the IT decision makers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doubling the RAM of every single computer in the company. It was unspeakbly stupid in every possible way.