Notes Compared to Home Construction

While playing Rock's Clues, Mike Schubert posted the following:

Lotus Geeks build a Habitat for Humanity house maybe? Let's see:

- It would be painted yellow/orange/whatever that color is.
- The mailbox wouldn't look like any of the other mailboxes, so people would complain.
- The house would be useful beyond anyone's wildest desires, but no one would be able to get past the fact the mailbox looked different.
- Maintenance costs would be lower
- The project will never be completed because we all have "architect" in our titles now and therefore would not actually want to pick up a hammer and look like an "engineer".

I love that analogy. This is precisely how the industry is, though. At Ed Brill's blog, someone was talking about the need for a better UI for Notes. UI is subjective for the most part. Honestly, I could care less about Outlook. I'm really only familiar with Outlook 2000, but have used 2003 before. It's nothing to write home about. Am I a bit biased? Possibly. But, Notes has really come a long way with it's UI and developers have a lot of control over the present database UI. We have some quick and dirty databases that I would hate for anyone to see. On the other hand, we have some fairly slick databases where we have focused more on the UI. I guess it's just my little rant on UI.

Just because the mailbox looks different doesn't mean it's bad!