You remember it. That one piece of enterprise software at your first corporate job that made you want to throw your monitor out the window. For an entire generation of office workers, that software was Lotus Notes.
It was the digital equivalent of a root canal—painful, agonizingly slow, and universally despised. But here’s the dirty secret: people are still using it. Right now. In 2024.
One user recently admitted they were forced to use Lotus Notes at a major British blue-chip company until 2022. They eventually left the company, but the software stayed. It’s still there, lurking in the corporate shadows, running timesheets and databases. Why? Because it wasn’t just an email client. It was a monolithic, all-in-one beast that handled everything. It did everything, but it did absolutely nothing well.
We don’t build software for users anymore. We build digital cages so intricate that escaping them requires tearing down the entire business.
We look back at Lotus Notes and laugh at its clunky 90s UI. We think it survived decades past its prime by accident. It didn’t. It survived because it was a masterpiece of entrapment. The developers built a monolithic platform from scratch, deeply embedding it into every single business process until ripping it out meant killing the patient. Starting from scratch didn’t just risk failure for the builders; it created an inescapable zombie trap for the users.
And modern software developers are making the exact same mistake today.
You see it everywhere: product managers obsessed with building “all-in-one platforms” that bundle CRM, messaging, billing, and analytics into a single, massive interface. It’s an ego trip. It’s feature bloat disguised as “synergy.”
When you build a monolith, you aren’t creating a product. You’re pouring concrete around your users’ ankles and calling it a swimming pool.
If you are building a platform right now, you need to understand the long-term dangers of ignoring composability. When you build everything from scratch, tightly coupling features instead of creating interoperable components, your software becomes un-killable. It will outlive your career. It will outlive the original business requirements. It will haunt enterprises for decades because the switching costs become too catastrophic to bear.
The trauma of using Lotus Notes wasn’t just the ugly interface. It was the helpless resignation of being trapped in a system everyone hated but no one could afford to replace.
The next time you’re tempted to build an all-in-one monolith, remember Lotus Notes. Remember that universally despised, clunky zombie that refused to die.
You can build software people love, or you can build software they can never leave. You can’t do both.
FAQ
Q: Isn't an all-in-one platform more convenient for the user?
A: No, it's convenient for the sales team. For the user, it means being trapped in a mediocre experience across every feature because the platform does everything, but nothing well.
Q: How do we avoid building a zombie trap?
A: Build for composability. Create interoperable components with clear APIs rather than tightly coupled monoliths. If a component needs to be replaced, it should be a surgical swap, not a corporate heart transplant.
Q: Isn't locking users in just a smart business strategy?
A: It's a parasite's strategy. You might retain users through sheer entrenchment, but you breed deep resentment. You're optimizing for captivity, not value.