It was an era when Windows had near total Desktop market share in businesses - and Notes violated all Windows UI conventions. Enter MS Office (pre-ribbon) and LN was toast.
MSFT was so dominant back then that Gates had to rescue Apple to keep up the appearance of a fair market!
This. Microsoft was very aggressive in courting CIOs and senior management, and had a great sales team.
I remember hearing that they had a storage calculator spreadsheet that would allow you to calculate how many IOPS you'd need from your storage to deploy Exchange.
Everyone I knew working with Notes or other products was gobsmacked. Why would you need that? Just buy decent storage. Nobody outside of the Exchange world cared about IOPS, unless you were dealing with of high thousands of users on one machine/cluster.
But the Exchange Server storage layer was a total dog's breakfast. (And not a healthy dog, either.) So disk performance was much more important for them.
And that spreadsheet was like crack for the senior management layer. They suddenly got to play with the numbers of users, mails per hour, mailbox quotas - then feel like they had involvement. They had input. They could go to their storage vendors with those figures and speak authoratitively about their requirements.
Those vendors would humour them, and sell them the exact same array that everyone else was buying for that capacity requirement and budget.
But Microsoft had turned a weakness into a strength, by making the managers feel like they had real input into the process.
Honestly, that spreadsheet was a genius move that it took me years to understand.
As a former Notes user (email, cal, plus apps for expense tracking, etc) - what did Notes in was the horrendous, non-Windows user interface. The second half of the article here is spot on, if anyone bothers to read it. Nice to see those old site ridiculing Notes, Jeff Atwood et al - a blast from the past!
As an end-user, I welcomed Notes demise.
And don't get me started on its god-awful local/offline sync behavior. Outlook ran circles around it. Hard to believe from todays perspective, sure, but yes, Lotus Notes was so much worse.
I was part of the small team that added Exchange Offline mode very, very late in the product cycle specifically to counter the Notes Local Replication story.
We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.
The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.
What was so bad about the non-Windows interface other than it wasn't Windows? I didn't have problems with using Notes email or developing apps for Notes. It had incredible workflow and database replication features. Blew anything Microsoft had at the time out of the water. When I was forced to start using Outlook, didn't care for it. Still don't think it's all that great. I guess Sharepoint is decent enough now.
Sure I guess if all you cared about as an end-user was email and Windows-like UI, then I guess I understand. But you were missing a ton of other things.
Finally within the last 1-2 years, SharePoint Online in combination with the various other M365 services (and Azure) is "pretty good".
Low-code/no-code is available with SharePoint Lists (with some level of JSON customization), but mainly PowerPlatform.
But if you need to, you can develop extensions/webparts in JavaScript/TypeScript. While the ability to include arbitrary JS within Pages is mostly "gone" (except I guess for this latest CoPilot/HTML offering - although you are limited in how/what you can do with JavaScript), that means better structure - we will see how the replacement of VBA with "Office Scripts" goes.
Then you link in things like Teams, M365 Groups, Loop, "Forms", Planner, Purview and you can get quite the mix of capabilities.
Gemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.
"the only reason HIV transmission is high in poor countries is because, well, they're poor."
This is factually untrue.
Being poor does not equal a HIV transmission rate. There is no 1:1 correlation.
A single protected (condom) sexual act between a male and female averages somewhere around 0.1-0.5% chance of pregnancy, and during the fertile window it could still be around 1% or more even with a condom.
Chance of HIV from one act of unprotected vaginal sex with an HIV-positive partner: ~0.08% male-to-female.
The high HIV transmission rates are NOT correlated with wealth, but social behavior. Unprotected anal sex with many partners? High risk. Now, Africa - the practice of dry sex contributes a ton to HIV transmission. Cultural belief that a dry vagina increases pleasure, hence woman use sand, chalk or bleach to dry out their vaginas, massively increasing HIV risk. Needle sharing of drug users? High HIV risk.
Not a class issue, no reason to punch down on poor people. Poor people have agency and many do not infect themselves with HIV in the first place.
I don't think the original assertion is "punching down" on poor people. While you're correct that poverty isn't the "only reason" for high HIV transmission, poverty certainly contributes to it, via lack of access to health care and lack of access to education. How is it less "punching down" to attribute it to social behavior and culture? Isn't needle sharing associated with poverty, or would you also call that "culture"?
"I share needles because I can't afford my own" is an INSANE take. Don't shoot drugs in the first place! Poor people are normal humans, they have willpower, agency. It is a rich people myth that poor people are cattle, devoid of any chance of doing the right thing.
It is culture, behavior, social norms. Being poor does not force you to abandon the nuclear family, does not force you to engage in criminal acts. (there is reverse causality though)
In the early 1960s South Korea had a per capita income lower than those of Haiti, Ethiopia, and Yemen, and about 40% below India's. Did all South Koreans become heroin addicts with HIV?
People enjoy drugs, people enjoy sex. If your solution to driving fatalities is not to drive, you have not solved anything.
Not having sex and not doing drugs isn't any sort of "right thing" other than because sex and drugs are dangerous. If sex and drugs were less dangerous (or made not dangerous at all) there would be no reason to tell people not to do them.
The wealthy use drugs and have sex all the time. They just have clean needles and nice doctors. You've completely bought into the moral explanation for poverty - which is that moral decay causes poverty, but poverty does not cause moral decay. But you think that this is a defense of the poor, rather than a defense of the exploitation and contempt for the poor by the rich.
The poor are not worse than the rich even if they do drugs, have sex, or swear on Sunday.
like insulin? should a diabetic skip the insulin? In poor countries I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of HIV infections are not as preventable as you're imagining.
You can moralize, but even if only 10% of HIV infections are unavoidable, you're not contributing to solving the actual problem. (And by unavoidable I mean, unavoidable without investing in more needles, better sanitation, or prophylactics that the people "responsible" cannot afford.)
Thanks for your contribution. Gonna hop on a jet to Zambia tomorrow and tell kids with HIV there that it's their fault they were born with the virus and maybe they shouldn't have shared needles.
assume you have a population of IV drug users. as a society, would you prefer to spend nothing and see them develop HIV, or to spend some and control the HIV?
you don't have to care about the drug users at all. even if you treat them as pests rather than humans, we frequently vaccinate pests for public health measures. pathogens will spill over to populations you do care about, they'll create a drain on the healthcare system, they'll harbor other opportunistic infections. it's not sanitary.
this is completely leaving aside that some drug addicts can and do turn their life around, and that HIV is a horrible illness nobody should have to deal with, even if it's "their fault."
Being poor correlates with adverse health outcomes. If you insist (as you do) that those health outcomes are due entirely to culture and willpower, then you are forced to conclude that poor people have low willpower and are less moral. This is an unprovable assertion, based entirely on your own vibes, and is frankly a cruel thing to say. It basically asserts that these people deserve the things that happen to them, because they were avoidable and entirely due to their choices.
This is not a celebration of human agency. When people are treated badly, they behave badly. It is completely irrelevant that you were treated badly and happened not to behave badly. People are far too complex for you to say "well, we got treated the same, we should have behaved the same".
Dry sex in SSA may be one of the contributing factors, but it’s never been truly proven out as a key contributor in any study I have read; they always address it but say more needs to be done to be certain.
Your comment makes it seem like a key factor when it’s not.
In the Global Burden of Disease analyses, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) had the highest age-standardized STI incidence rate of any world region — around 19,973 per 100,000 person-years, which is roughly double the global average of about 9,536 cases per 100,000.
Forecasts to 2030 expect sub-Saharan Africa to continue having the highest incidence rates of both HIV and other STIs of any region.
How come a specific region of the globe has this issue? "Poverty"?
Many regions in India are poor. Afghanistan. Pakistan.
Love the science based debate here, btw, thank you all for the downvotes. Facts, not feelings.
Tangent - I still mourn the death of WeAreHunted. What a great music discovery site that was, unmatched in its ability to give you a curated feed of new artists to check out.
WeAreHunted was sold to Twitter at the time to launch as Twitter Music! What an idea, music discovery, right in your big feed. Brilliant.
This was the time when Twitter also launched Vine - to also shutter it.
Great ideas, killed prematurely as TikTok took them and ran away with them. TT is now my #1 music discovery service, not great, just the only one that actually works.
And for some non-geoblocked music, if you want to actually purchase the song as MP3, there's no way unless you have a Mac or Windows PC to install iTunes (too bad for Linux users).
https://uk.7digital.com/ has a lot of songs available in MP3 format, but not as many as on iTunes.
MSFT was so dominant back then that Gates had to rescue Apple to keep up the appearance of a fair market!
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