Bloated Goats Zombies, eh?
snigger
If we can get away from systems to send search requests for everything you typed, that would make me happy.
âYou pressed a key. Iâll send a search request for that. Ooh, you typed another key. Let me update the search request. And another key! Gotta update the search request. Heâs typed another key! Another search request, baby! And yet another! Search all the things!â
Computer/web browser/mail program/whatever, you can wait two seconds before sending a search request so that it doesnât slow me down when I type. It doesnât have to be with Every. Single. Key. Press.
That actually goes back to the timer concept I proposed a while ago. The computer starts a timer when key detection indicates thereâs a pause. When it reaches a certain amount, like two seconds or thirty, then the computer can see âthe human isnât doing anything at this moment, so now I can slip something in that needs their attentionâ (or the outgoing search request).
This website does this. As I type this message, if I pause for three seconds, the auto-save feature kicks in. It doesnât try doing that in between each letter I type. I havenât tested my typing speed lately, but I think it used to be about 40 words per minute. That equals about two or three letters per seconds, so the auto-save function is being smart and not trying to do a save multiple times a second.
The IBM Verse mail program that Iâm stuck with on my smartphone does the âsearch after every keypressâ method. Makes it really annoying trying to edit who messages are going to and is one of the main reasons why I bought a Bluetooth keyboard so I could highlight a section of characters and delete them with one keystroke to avoid the slowdown nuisance.
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I still have nightmares about Bloated Goats and I havenât had to support it in over a decade.
Holy crap, donât Google that.
I wasnât sure if it was a generalization or a dig at one specific software. Now I donât care anymore. Yuck.
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For the uninitiated, âBloated Goatsâ was better known as âLotus Notes.â
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Iâd say the opposite. Lotus Notes was better known as Bloated Goats 
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I think IBM is in for a world of butthurt.
On that specific El Reg article, one commentard said that M$ Office is the de facto standard, and trying to get people to switch over will be very difficult.
It can only be achieved if Bloated Goats is overhauled totally, to cut out slowness (as per @RRabbit42âs post above) and making it much better than the current Office iteration that people will want to use it.
Otherwise itâll be an Sisyphean excercise. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus)
Plus another hurdle to jump will be that their client (and possibly server) will need to run and target multiple platforms (Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux etc).
So this will be very interesting.
Iâll just start with a clean slate instead, incorporate LibreOffice/OpenOffice and use Open Source technologies instead, bundle it and make it work and interoperate better than MS Office⌠but thatâs just me.
Have loaded Lotus Smartsuite on OS/2 recently, it looks very, very dated. Not to mention what manners of nasty bugs and vulnerabilities may exist as well.
Iâm so sorry, my assumption was that world+dog would have made the association between âbloated goatsâ and âlotus notesâ a long time ago.
My sincere apologies.
Now can I offer Sir a free mindscrub and eyebleach, courtesy of the Acme Corp? 
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No worries. Thankfully, Iâve never worked someplace that used Lotus Notes, at least, not while I was there, so I was spared some of the horror.
Had the pleasure of using Bloated Goats at the George job.
Itâs remarkable when a piece of software is so bad that it makes you actually excited to work somewhere that uses Exchange/Outlook.
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IBM still uses it, and they are a big contracting firm nowadays, soâŚ
Bloated Goats?? Oh, please⌠No⌠Anything but that.
Many years ago I was on a working party that was tasked with selecting the next email / collaboration / calendaring solution for $BigPlace. We looked at Novellâs offering, Exchange, Oracleâs product and maybe something else. I think we eventually selected the Oracle offering because of itâs integration of everything (and the fact that we were very much an Oracle shop).
So we were all rather surprised when it was announced that Bloated Goats was the preferred solution. It was procalimed that by the end of the year, the first 15,000 users would be migrated and a further 70,000 users would be migrated over the next couple of years.
5 YEARS later, we had 1/3 of the first migration completed.
Thankfully, I was a sysadmin with a Unix box and I was able to use Fetchmail and my own solution to get around the crawling horror that was dropped upon us.
Just as an aside, who first started to call it Bloated Goats?
Just googled it, apparently goat bloat happens when the rumen bacteria dies and the food cannot be properly digested by the rest of the digestive tract.
Now this alone gives me a sort of an idea why it is called Bloated Goats - the program itself throttles information passthrough.
And yep, thereâs still life in Bloated Goats⌠/inserts goatbleat.mp3
I always felt the biggest issue with Lotus Notes or whatever it was called from day to day was that it was an âinternalâ email system when internet email was the standard. I think that was the same problem a former employer had that used Novelâs GroupWise setup: It was based around internal email (I.E. all users on the same system or cluster of systems) which had to go through a lot of translation to talk to everyone else in the world. Exchange, despite itâs many faults, didnât seem to have this issue.
Of course, it also had a massive footprint as it tried to be an application framework/middleware/almost-an-OS that probably ran great in demos and nowhere else.
What worries me about this is that HCL is the company that bought up the helpdesk company I work for a couple of years ago, and that theyâll try and foist this abomination on usâŚ
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Maybe theyâll find the rollout as slow as everyone else apparently did?
Most likely, theyâve owned us for damn near 3 years now and still havenât gotten us updated to Windows 10 or even onto equipment on their domain, despite them activating the little bits in Teams and Outlook that prevent you from saving stuff to your machine if itâs not on their domainâŚ
Ya for incompetence?
I got moved into a âcontractorâ role years ago and they basically made use use a VDI for all the ânew bossâ stuff that used their own half-assed messaging system and email. I think I was not the only one who kept using the âClientâ (formerly employer) email/IM/etc. as it was slightly less weird spite that company being dysfunctional and thinking theyâd save money by outsourcing their IT staff.
Managing acquisitions is a really interesting view of how a company works. Iâve seen one that were âhands offâ so the new company got to basically do whatever they wanted for a couple years. Run their own email, infrastructure, etc. The more normal are still a negotiation as you get, âWhy canât we keep using out gmail accounts weâve used for years?â and similar questions.
The âReverse buy-outâ is the fun one. Thatâs when a company buys a smaller company, and the smaller company ends up effectively in charge for whatever reason. See âApple buys NeXTâ and others.
This is actually what happened with our previous âacquisitionâ. WTFHelpdesk, as I tend to call them on the DailyWTF boards, was bought out by another Helpdesk company a number of years ago, but our upper management managed to âinfectâ theirs and basically completely took over. Then we got bought again and I kind of doubt weâll be able to pull off the same thing with a giant Indian multi-tech firmâŚ