I was typing in Microsoft Word and I started a bulleted list with an item like this:

• Topic1. A sentence about Topic1. And another one.

Then I hit the Enter key.

What do you think happened?

Not only did I get another bulleted list item, Word set the font to bold!

So I typed this:

• Topic2.

And as soon as I typed the period, Word turned bold off!! Not only did it figure out that I’m creating a bulleted list, it figured out that I’m starting each bullet with bold font, followed by a period, followed by more text in regular font, and it takes care of everything for me automatically! That’s pretty sophisticated.

Compare that to Lotus Notes, which can’t even figure out when I hit Enter twice that I want to turn the bullets off!

We use Notes at work and I swear to God, if I type a bulleted list and hit Enter twice, Notes gives me this:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3
•  
•  

I actually have to turn bulleting off manually! Does anyone really want to create a bulleted list with multiple empty items?

I’ve never seen another text editor do something this stupid . . .

I’m working with a company that uses Lotus Notes. It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve had to use Notes and it’s as bad as ever. It’s probably the worst piece of software ever released by a major company.

The worst feature — well, it’s hard to pick a worst feature, but one of the worst features — because I have to deal with it dozens of times a day — is the way Notes makes me reply to email. I can’t just click Reply and start typing. When I click Reply, I get a dropdown list of options and have to select one:

- Reply
- Reply with History
- Reply without Attachment(s)
- Reply with Internet-Style History

The godawful thing about this is that default options for email work 100 percent of the time. I always want to reply with history and without attachments, so why give me a bunch of options that I don’t want and make me explicitly select one every time?

Why would I not want to reply with history? If I’m sending replies without including the original email for context, most people send and get way too much email to remember what the heck I’m responding to.

And why would I send an attachment back to someone with my reply? They already have the document. They sent it to me. They don’t need another copy of it. But every day I see emails going back and forth across the network with multi-megabyte attachments because people have to explicitly select an option to remove it.

This essay by Turing Award-winner Fred Brooks is almost 20 years old now. Sadly, the ideas on incremental development are still considered outside the mainstream in IT, which continues to favor the widely-discredited waterfall approach.

Continue reading Respect the Classics, Man: No Silver Bullet