> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.”

I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.

This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.

This article just reads weird to me.

The larger point - which they made poorly - seems to be that Notes made a lot of decisions that probably were fine alone. However nothing stands alone, and everybody else made a different decision.

Some of the different decisions everybody made were for good reason. I know Apple and [later] Microsoft spent a large amount of money on human factors engineers doing real experiments to figure out what worked. I have never seen evidence that Lotus spent the money to see what was a good idea - they just made it work.

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!

> For most users who only use a single platform

Also depends if your "platform" extends beyond just the OS. If platform includes IDE/editor/terminal, then a lot of users are juggling multiple keyboard schemes from different eras (ctrl-C has entered the chat).