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.