Sunday, 25 November 2012

LOTUS: FAREWELL TO A ONCE-GREAT TECH BRAND

Just heard the news about IBM's plan to remove the Lotus branding from its Notes and Domino workgroup products. It’s the apparent end of Lotus, a brand which was launched in 1982 with the 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the most important productivity application of its era.

It’s tough to remember now, but in the period before Microsoft Office came along, it was Lotus, not Microsoft, that was synonymous with office software. Lotus Development Corporation, which Mitch Kapor founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had a ginormous cash cow in 1-2-3, a product which was so popular that companies bought fleets of IBM PCs just to run it.

Lotus cranked out (and sometimes acquired) an array of apps: Approach, cc:Mail, Hal, Improv, Jazz, Manuscript, Magellan, Organizer, Symphony and many more. They weren’t always successful — in fact, many of them came and went rather quickly — but the company had a really good track record when it came to releasing stuff that was inventive and interesting.
In the 1980s, Lotus was the single most significant Boston-based tech company. Then in 1994 and 1995, and by the mid-1990s, it was reasonably obvious that Microsoft Office was going to slaughter the famous stand-alone productivity packages of the DOS days — not just 1-2-3, but also dBASE, Harvard Graphics, WordPerfect and others. Lotus was smart enough to get into another, nascent business: workgroup software. Notes turned out to be a big deal, and led to IBM buying the company in 1995 for $3.5 billion. And Notes is still with us today, even though Microsoft ended up dominating that market too, with Outlook and Exchange.
So the Lotus which is now on its way out is a dim reflection of its former self. It isn’t the great Lotus, or my Lotus. Truth to tell, I wasn’t even sure it was still around. Even so, I’m sorry to think about the mighty brand disappearing altogether.

Then again, maybe it won’t — it’s hard to snuff all the life out of a once-powerful name, no matter how far it’s fallen. IBM hasn’t updated 1-2-3 in well over a decade, but it’ll sell you a copy today. The wonderfully archaic-sounding Lotus 1-2-3 Millennium Edition 9.8 goes for a mere $342.

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