From the Reproof blog

Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early

PLATO, the computer that inspired Ray Ozzie and team.

Starting from zero is fraught with risk. You're deciding everything. What should features be called, how should they work, what keyboard shortcuts should be used, how should interoperability work?

Thus it was for Lotus Notes, one of the earlier and most influential email apps. It was the best of email, an app that was ahead of its time with encryption, rich text, attachments, read receipts, and much more years before normal email. And it was the worst of email, to others, with a non-standard interface, shortcuts and UX copy that differed from other email apps. They’d invented almost everything from scratch when there weren’t standards to pull from.

There are people to this day who wistfully recall the early apps and tools they built for their business in Lotus Notes. And others, many others, who hated Lotus Notes enough to build sites called things like Lotus Notes Interface Hall of Shame and start user groups called I hate Lotus Notes.

The risks, alas, of being early.

Yet when I talked to Ray Ozzie about building Lotus Notes, he struck me as the opposite of depressed about the outcome of his creation. “It’s disappointing to see people criticizing your work. But you know what? You have to develop a kind of thick skin when you do those things,” said Ozzie.

“As long as people are using our work, and it’s providing value, how could we not be overjoyed?” He’d built the app, turned a dream into reality, caused some people to care enough that they’d rant about his app, and he had the T-shirt to show for it.

And yet he was optimistic about building things, about the future, about how being able to use AI to code a game idea into reality “portends the ultimate realization of removing all that friction between you and creating” even as he worried aloud about its risks.

Something struck me through the conversation: It’s easy to be pessimistic, and optimism requires active striving. And that it’s worth striving for.

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