Therefore it began investing in software start-ups and began developing completely new programs. Lotus at this stage was still a one product company and it needed to diversify and develop new products. Manzi rapidly took over the day-to-day operations of Lotus and it has to be admitted he was not universally liked, as he hired teams of managers from corporate giants such as IBM (instead of hiring internally) to give Lotus more a more disciplined working environment. Manzi, a former management consultant, as marketing director.

Kapor however had recognised that the informal management style at Lotus needed more structure, and he brought in Jim P. This helped Lotus become the second largest software company in 1983, just behind Microsoft.īut things were changing at Lotus, when in October 1983 it went public. It overtook VisiCalc to become the number one selling software package, and during its first nine months on the market nearly 110,000 copies of 1-2-3 were sold. Lotus 1-2-3 was released in January 1983 and it became a huge sales success, having achieved more than $1 million in orders before its official release. This gave Lotus an edge over the spreadsheet capabilities of its rival VisiCalc.Īs a result, Lotus was able to land $5m in venture capital funding, an incredible amount for a young software company at that time. Kapor had previously worked as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, but he left that firm to found Lotus. Working alongside programmer Jonathan Sachs, they developed a new package that integrated a spreadsheet and graphics program.īoth men spent months making this package fast, and it was able to exploit the 256-bit memory that new PCs shipped with. Lotus on the other hand had released its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product back in the heady days of early 1983, when the impact of the IBM PC first began to be felt. It only developed its first Office product in 1988. Microsoft in comparison was a much older rival, having been founded way back in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He came up with the Lotus name as Kapor was also a teacher of Transcendental Meditation techniques. Lotus Software was a much younger company than Microsoft, as it was founded in Massachusetts in 1982 by 32-year-old Mitchell D.

Indeed, long before Microsoft dominated the Office sector, Lotus Software had a head start with respected products such as Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheet) and Lotus Notes (groupware). Lotus Software was one such company, and it had a real opportunity to dominate the Office productivity suite market in what was the growing PC era of the 1980s and 1990s. As the PC emerged as the main computing platform for millions of businesses around the world, a number of tech firms vied for the chance to become market leaders in the decades that followed.

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