Agenda was supposed to be a meta-framework for writing your own apps.
Almost nobody used it that way.
The included demo Planner app was amazing.
You stayed organized by typing simple narrative notes about what happened, and it picked up clues from your text.
As you went along, you would add to its lists of places where you might be, people with whom you might meet, projects you might work on, etc. as 'Categories'.
As you typed your notes, Agenda Planner would pick out names, places, dates, etc., and link the note to the appropriate categories, working in the background, usually overnight. It was hell on hard disks with small caches.
That way, a To Do List was just another 'View', showing stuff you hadn't completed, in temporal order, or any order you liked, and a summary of a single project was yet another View.
IBM tried to sell Notes as an 'application framework', but couldn't explain what that meant.
As recompense for killing Notes, I got a free copy of Lotus Organizer, which was a pretty but primitive day planner, with no inference engine behind it. It was nice looking garbage.
My boss invited a couple of IBM dudes to show up and sell us Notes. They spent the whole day there, and couldn't get either of their laptops to talk over our network. Then they told us about the wonderful stuff that we'd be able to use Notes for, if we ever got it to work at our facility. Never even saw a demo screen. Never got a brochure. Never got a quotation. Never got a demo disk. Even AOL did a better marketing job than that.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA