IBM Lotus

Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018.

Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. 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 client–server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete.

On December 6, 2018, IBM announced the sale of Lotus Software/Domino to HCL for $1.8 billion.

History

Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs with backing from Ben Rosen. Lotus's first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. 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.

Shortly after Kapor left Visi-Corp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. 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, word processor, and database manager. In practice the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available.

Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year, compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million in sales. In 1982 Jim Manzi — a graduate of Colgate University and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy — came to Lotus as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and became an employee four months later. 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. Manzi remained at the head of Lotus until 1995.

Dominance

As the popularity of the personal computer grew, Lotus quickly came to dominate the spreadsheet market. 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. Jazz did very poorly in the market (in Guy Kawasaki's book ''The Macintosh Way,'' Lotus Jazz was described as being so bad, "even the people who pirated it returned it"). Also in 1985, Lotus bought Software Arts and discontinued its VisiCalc program.

In the late 1980s Lotus developed Lotus Magellan, an innovative personal information manager (PIM) which flopped, and Improv, a ground-breaking modeling package (and spreadsheet) for the NeXT platform, were released. Improv also flopped, and none of these products made a significant impact on the market.

"Look and feel" lawsuits

Lotus was involved in a number of lawsuits, of which the most significant were the "look and feel" cases which started in 1987. Lotus sued Paperback Software and Mosaic for copyright infringement, false and misleading advertising, and unfair competition