7 ms·

Windows ain't done 'til Lotus won't run! Just a little "friendly competition" in the words of 1985 NYT.

mschaef 9y ago
Lotus did a good job shooting itself in the foot. It's easy to second guess in hindsight, but it always amazed me that they didn't have any Windows story at all for their one major product, Lotus 1-2-3, until 1991 or 92. (And even then it was amazingly buggy.) (And they did have multiple text-mode PC versions, VMS, Unix, Improv for NeXTStep...)
- pinewurst 9y ago
  It shouldn't be forgotten though that the original Lotus 1-2-3 was a masterpiece. Fast, easy to use, with a polished UI, a useful help system and tutorial. Almost all PC apps were amateur hour by comparison and that includes pre-Word MS.
  - mschaef 9y ago
    Absolutely - Versions 1 and 2 were brilliant. I remember watching my dad use it with the keyboard shortcuts and wondering how he navigated the menus without the arrows. Those slash commands wound up at the core of a nice little macro langauge in v1 that was heavily elaborated in v2. (I remember commands for custom menus, etc.) (...and it all worked on a 4.77MHz 8088.)
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Word was a joke in the 80s/90s. Everyone used WordPerfect. By the end of the 90s though the MS Office addon had overtaken most places productivity software of choice. Primarily due to companies like Dell, Gateway 2000, AST, HP, Compaq, etc. including Office as an option when you purchased. I loved WP and 123. Begrudgingly switched to MS Office in 97.
    - mikestew 9y ago
      Primarily due to companies like Dell, Gateway 2000, AST, HP, Compaq, etc. including Office as an option when you purchased. I would posit that it was due to WP screwing the pooch at every turn. They held out until they couldn't on releasing a Windows version, and it was as buggy and unreliable as you would expect from a rushed product designed to check a marketing checkbox. WP also bet on OS/2, and they did it by porting what was already a poor product, so the OS/2 version ended up being a poor, buggy product that had the added bonus (due to an interpretation layer) of being dog slow. So maybe Microsoft's success can be attributed somewhat to bundling, but much of it can also be laid at the feet of competitors like WP and Lotus.
      - AgentIcarus 9y ago
        Was there something special about OS/2 that suggested it would be the winner of this war or did WP and Lotus just make the same bad bet at the same time?
        mikestew 9y ago
        Remember the state of Microsoft's operating systems in 1992, when OS/2 2.0 was released: DOS, a purchased operating system that was barely worthy of the name, and a graphical shell on top of it. In other words, a house of cards and just as reliable. Cooperative, not pre-emptive, multitasking. 16-bits when 32-bit CPUs were standard. Contrast to OS/2 that had a 32-bit API, pre-emptive multitasking, and a more robust file system, all with the backing of IBM. That might not be a sure bet, but it was a good one. Turns out it wasn't, but it might have looked like it at the time given that it was inarguably technically superior to Windows 3.x and DOS. As it turned out, IBM refused to effectively market OS/2 and Microsoft was busy cutting bundling deals with manufacturers while releasing their "munchkins" (look it up, it's well documented) on Compuserve and Usenet. And then Windows NT came out, giving Microsoft a much less laughable operating system in their quiver, and that was pretty much it for OS/2.
        scholia 9y ago
- bboreham 9y ago
  They bet on OS/2, and had a solid version for that around 1988. But nobody wanted it. Their solution was to go multi-platform, with an all-singing cross-platform super-product that would run everywhere. Except it didn't actually run anywhere; it broke under its own weight. So they were very much behind when they finally buckled down to porting the 1-2-3 codebase to Windows in 1991. Source: I was on the team that shipped the Motif and OpenLook versions of 1-2-3, separate but concurrent to the above.
  - mschaef 9y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Was there able to be any code sharing between the Motif/OpenLook versions and the DOS/OS/2 versions? (Or just concepts?) The other thing I should've mentioned is that at the time, OS/2 did look like the surer bet than Windows. The success of Windows surprised everybody (including, I think, Microsoft.)
    - yuhong 9y ago
      Indeed the OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of the worst debacles in MS's history.
      - mschaef 9y ago
        Technical issues aside, Windows by itself made MS >$100B over the last 10 years. If that's 'one of the worst debacles'... (I did like MS OS/2 2.0 though...)
        yuhong 9y ago
        One of the reasons is the unethical attacks they did later on.
    - bboreham 9y ago
      The spreadsheet engine was a port of the DOS version, which by that time was written in C. The GUI ran as a separate process and communicated with the engine via a character protocol into a bastardised "terminal driver". This fabulous kludge was driven by the testing regime: if we changed one byte of the spreadsheet engine it would trigger person-years of manual testing.
baldfat 9y ago
Lotus Notes and Domino which later became IMB's were awesome for its time.

Lotus did a good job shooting itself in the foot. It's easy to second guess in hindsight, but it always amazed me that they didn't have any Windows story at all for their one major product, Lotus 1-2-3, until 1991 or 92. (And even then it was amazingly buggy.) (And they did have multiple text-mode PC versions, VMS, Unix, Improv for NeXTStep...)

pinewurst 9y ago
It shouldn't be forgotten though that the original Lotus 1-2-3 was a masterpiece. Fast, easy to use, with a polished UI, a useful help system and tutorial. Almost all PC apps were amateur hour by comparison and that includes pre-Word MS.
- mschaef 9y ago
  Absolutely - Versions 1 and 2 were brilliant. I remember watching my dad use it with the keyboard shortcuts and wondering how he navigated the menus without the arrows. Those slash commands wound up at the core of a nice little macro langauge in v1 that was heavily elaborated in v2. (I remember commands for custom menus, etc.) (...and it all worked on a 4.77MHz 8088.)
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Word was a joke in the 80s/90s. Everyone used WordPerfect. By the end of the 90s though the MS Office addon had overtaken most places productivity software of choice. Primarily due to companies like Dell, Gateway 2000, AST, HP, Compaq, etc. including Office as an option when you purchased. I loved WP and 123. Begrudgingly switched to MS Office in 97.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    Primarily due to companies like Dell, Gateway 2000, AST, HP, Compaq, etc. including Office as an option when you purchased. I would posit that it was due to WP screwing the pooch at every turn. They held out until they couldn't on releasing a Windows version, and it was as buggy and unreliable as you would expect from a rushed product designed to check a marketing checkbox. WP also bet on OS/2, and they did it by porting what was already a poor product, so the OS/2 version ended up being a poor, buggy product that had the added bonus (due to an interpretation layer) of being dog slow. So maybe Microsoft's success can be attributed somewhat to bundling, but much of it can also be laid at the feet of competitors like WP and Lotus.
    - AgentIcarus 9y ago
      Was there something special about OS/2 that suggested it would be the winner of this war or did WP and Lotus just make the same bad bet at the same time?
      - mikestew 9y ago
        Remember the state of Microsoft's operating systems in 1992, when OS/2 2.0 was released: DOS, a purchased operating system that was barely worthy of the name, and a graphical shell on top of it. In other words, a house of cards and just as reliable. Cooperative, not pre-emptive, multitasking. 16-bits when 32-bit CPUs were standard. Contrast to OS/2 that had a 32-bit API, pre-emptive multitasking, and a more robust file system, all with the backing of IBM. That might not be a sure bet, but it was a good one. Turns out it wasn't, but it might have looked like it at the time given that it was inarguably technically superior to Windows 3.x and DOS. As it turned out, IBM refused to effectively market OS/2 and Microsoft was busy cutting bundling deals with manufacturers while releasing their "munchkins" (look it up, it's well documented) on Compuserve and Usenet. And then Windows NT came out, giving Microsoft a much less laughable operating system in their quiver, and that was pretty much it for OS/2.
        scholia 9y ago
bboreham 9y ago
They bet on OS/2, and had a solid version for that around 1988. But nobody wanted it. Their solution was to go multi-platform, with an all-singing cross-platform super-product that would run everywhere. Except it didn't actually run anywhere; it broke under its own weight. So they were very much behind when they finally buckled down to porting the 1-2-3 codebase to Windows in 1991. Source: I was on the team that shipped the Motif and OpenLook versions of 1-2-3, separate but concurrent to the above.
- mschaef 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Was there able to be any code sharing between the Motif/OpenLook versions and the DOS/OS/2 versions? (Or just concepts?) The other thing I should've mentioned is that at the time, OS/2 did look like the surer bet than Windows. The success of Windows surprised everybody (including, I think, Microsoft.)
  - yuhong 9y ago
    Indeed the OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of the worst debacles in MS's history.
    - mschaef 9y ago
      Technical issues aside, Windows by itself made MS >$100B over the last 10 years. If that's 'one of the worst debacles'... (I did like MS OS/2 2.0 though...)
      - yuhong 9y ago
        One of the reasons is the unethical attacks they did later on.
  - bboreham 9y ago
    The spreadsheet engine was a port of the DOS version, which by that time was written in C. The GUI ran as a separate process and communicated with the engine via a character protocol into a bastardised "terminal driver". This fabulous kludge was driven by the testing regime: if we changed one byte of the spreadsheet engine it would trigger person-years of manual testing.

baldfat 9y ago

Lotus Notes and Domino which later became IMB's were awesome for its time.