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Back then their competition was Lotus 1-2-3. What they were showing was that they had some basic automation for some common tasks (autofill, auto calculations,
by blihp 4y ago
Back then their competition was Lotus 1-2-3. What they were showing was that they had some basic automation for some common tasks (autofill, auto calculations, auto formatting) while everyone who was coming from Lotus, their target customer, knew how manual and tedious this kind of thing was to do. Plus the UI in Lotus was only slightly less convoluted than Emacs.
The part they should have shown was how you could have large, complex (for the time) spreadsheets and not run out of memory which was a significant advantage they had back then as DOS applications had serious memory constraints even with extended memory. A lot of heavy spreadsheet users switched to Excel for that feature alone.
- Narishma 4y ago> Plus the UI in Lotus was only slightly less convoluted than Emacs. Not really. This is from 1992, by then 1-2-3 was in its second version for Windows.
- blihp 4y agoI was referring to the DOS version which is what the majority of 1-2-3 users ever experienced. While the Windows version existed, it took far too long[1] to be released and was quite buggy. By the time Lotus had even a remotely viable Windows product, they were in 3rd place and had mostly bled out their users. [1] Windows 3.0 came out in mid-1990 and 1-2-3 for Windows came out at the end of 1991. The options to run 1-2-3 for DOS under Windows until then were comically non-viable. When 1-2-3 for Windows came out, it was practically unusable for those who waited and no longer mattered for those who had already switched away.
- Splatter 4y agoWordStar had a similar fate.