
- #Whatever happened to lotus 123 pro#
- #Whatever happened to lotus 123 software#
- #Whatever happened to lotus 123 windows#
To be fair, it would be wrong to suggest that the pre-IBM management at Lotus was peopled by a collection of Jack Welch clones. This one is deserving of consideration by the Harvard Business Review. One might have assumed IBM could have leveraged its storied muscle-not to mention all those PCs-to turn SmartSuite into a winner. In the process, Microsoft and other Internet-based alternatives sneaked up and surpassed Notes.Īnd the less said about Lotus' marvelous ineptitude to sell SmartSuite, the better. As somebody who used Notes for the last decade-before my department migrated to Microsoft ( msft) Outlook-I can swap horror stories about this product until the cows come home.įailing to exploit the once-significant advantages in collaboration and back-end deployment that Notes enjoyed over all rival products, Lotus and IBM blew a huge opportunity. What about Lotus Notes, the crown jewels that IBM so coveted? That's a good question. The vast majority of the products Lotus shipped to market have been, at best, mediocre.
#Whatever happened to lotus 123 software#
But that doesn't change the fact that Lotus has not enjoyed unqualified software success since 1-2-3 was No. Of course, Microsoft lent a helping hand. Still, the Lotus-IBM combination looked pretty good on paper to a lot of people. Neither did a bunch of other mid- and senior-level suits who took their newly vested stock options and bolted. The only difference was that Lotus now had the biggest sugar daddy in the industry on its side. After Big Blue paid some $3.5 billion for Lotus, Lou Gerstner and his lieutenants were especially careful to keep a respectful distance. In a soon-to-be-announced reorganization, the swallowing up will be complete.Īnd so the nightmare scenario feared by some when IBM ( ibm) launched its hostile takeover of Lotus in June 1995 has finally been realized. On the eve of its annual user confab in Orlando, Fla., Lotus is about to become officially what a lot of people once feared it would become: just another indistinguishable outpost in the IBM empire. They don't need to because the old Lotus is history.


And last time I checked, nobody was talking about physically moving the operation, lock stock and barrel, anywhere. The Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field are long gone from the scene, while Lotus is still around, in the same corner of east Cambridge that it's always occupied. And the people played their crazy game with a joy I'd never seen."

"And there used to be a ballpark," crooned Ol' Blue Eyes, "where the field was warm and green. (They were not erased with the deletion of the last character of the paragraph as they are with Microsoft Word.Whenever somebody mentions Lotus Development, I can't help but recall a Frank Sinatra tune paying homage to the memory of a departed baseball team. Most notably, it was possible to easily control formatting with paragraph styles that were set with function keys, and were locked in for the whole paragraph.
#Whatever happened to lotus 123 pro#
The 16-bit Ami Pro had significant benefits, too.
#Whatever happened to lotus 123 windows#
The limitations were so severe that Lotus completely re-wrote the program from scratch when developing the 32-bit version for Windows 95. The 16-bit Ami Pro had significant limitations, most notably that it was unable to display the bottom of one page and the top of the next at the same time. IBM, the present owner of the Lotus mark, has replaced it with Lotus Word Pro. Eventually Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect as the dominant player and Ami Pro was discontinued. Both Ami Pro and Microsoft Word made inroads into WordPerfect's market share.

The notable feature of the Windows version of Ami Pro was the colorful SmartIcons.Īt the time that Ami Pro was introduced, the word processing market was dominated by WordPerfect. The developers of Ami Pro introduced a number of innovations in Ami Pro that were later adopted by other word processors. Ami preceded Windows as well as versions of those two competing products. (Samna was purchased by Lotus Software in 1990.) Shortly after its introduction, the name of the program was changed to "Ami Pro."Īmi Pro was a significant competitor to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect Corporation's WordPerfect during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor and was an obvious threat to command driven word processors such as WordPerfect and Microsoft Word who borrowed their use model from the Wang word processor. Lotus Ami Pro for Windows Home > Browse Our Collection > Software > Lotus > Lotus Ami Pro for WindowsĪmi was the name of a word processing program developed and marketed by Samna in the late 1980s.
