Lotus Smartsuite Software From IBM

By 2003 an About Lotus link returned to the Lotus.com page on its sidebar, but this time identifying the company as Lotus software from IBM and showing in its contact information Lotus Software, IBM Software Group.

Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie s Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes.

IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US 3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important clientserver computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBMs OfficeVision obsolete.

Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, and selling all his rights to Visi-Plot and Visi-Trend to Visi-Corp.

Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby Visi-Calc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product.

Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983.

The name referred to the three ways the product could be used, as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager.

In practice the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available.

In October 1984 he was named president, and in April 1986 he was appointed CEO, succeeding Kapor.

In July of that same year he also became Chairman of the Board.

Lotus introduced other office products such as Ray Ozzie s Symphony in 1984 and the Jazz office suite for the Apple Macintosh computer in 1985.

Also in 1985, Lotus bought Software Arts and discontinued its VisiCalc program.

Improv also flopped, and none of these products made a significant impact on the market.

Lotus sued Paperback Software and Mosaic for copyright infringement, false and misleading advertising, and unfair competition over their low-cost clones of 1-2-3, VP Planner and Twin, and sued Borland over its Quattro spreadsheet.

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This led Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, to found the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) and hold protests outside Lotus Development offices.

Paperback and Mosaic lost and went out of business; Borland won and survived.

The LPF filed an amicus curiae brief in the Borland case.

Several applications (1-2-3, Freelance Graphics, Ami Pro, Approach, and Lotus Organizer ) were bundled together under the name Lotus SmartSuite.

Although SmartSuite was bundled cheaply with many PCs and may initially have been more popular than Microsoft Office, Lotus quickly lost its dominance in the desktop applications market with the transition from 16- to 32-bit applications running on Windows 95.

In large part due to its focusing much of its development resources on a suite of applications for IBMs new (and eventually commercially unsuccessful) OS2 operating system, Lotus was late in delivering its suite of 32-bit products, and failed to capitalize on the transition to the new version of Windows.

The last significant new release was the SmartSuite Millennium Edition released in 1999.

As a result of this early speculative move, Lotus had gained significant experience in network-based communications years before other competitors in the PC world had even started thinking about networked computing or the Internet.

Lotus initially brought Lotus Notes to market in 1989, and later reinforced its market presence with the acquisition of cc:Mail in 1991.

Lotuss dominant groupware position attracted IBM, which needed to make a strategic move away from host-based messaging products and to establish a stronger presence in clientserver computing, but it also soon attracted stiff competition from Microsoft Exchange Server.

Jim Manzi looked for potential white knights, and forced IBM to increase its bid to 64.50 per share, for a 3.5 billion buyout of Lotus in July 1995.

On October 11, 1995 Manzi announced his resignation from what had become the Lotus Development division of IBM; he left with stock worth 78 million.

Also, IBM moved key marketing and management functions from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to IBMs New York office.

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