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On Tuesday, with no fanfare, IBM closed the last chapter in the life of one of the most iconic early computer programs, Lotus 1-2-3, when it withdrew support for the final build of the software.
IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x, and Organizer have now officially all passed their end of life support date and, according to IBM's website, "No service extensions will be offered" ( http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS913-091 ) – not that anyone is seriously using the spreadsheet any more.
It's a sadly muted end for what was, at one time, the world's premier spreadsheet. Lotus 1-2-3 was one of the first applications that made IBM's original PC a serious business tool, but it fell by the wayside due to poor coding decisions, failure to adapt, and the crushing tactics of Microsoft.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday October 03 2014, @01:58PM
All my memories of Lotus 1-2-3 are from the MS-DOS version. I still have it in a VM someplace. I used Ami Pro in college to write a lot of papers. I had a lot of love for Lotus products, but it's just a memory now. Lotus never found a way to transfer the slash key and light bar metaphor to Windows, and their Windows versions of 1-2-3 were always awful. Lotus also never seemed to make the transition from big-ticket software packages of the 80s to the Quattro Pro $49 world of the 90s.
Lotus was the victim of the "professional management" I keep taking about. The guy who ran Lotus in the mid-90s essentially stopped product development and tried to shop the company around. He failed to keep up with Microsoft, who ate Lotus' lunch and took its lunch money with Excel and Microsoft Office. MS spent the decade improving Excel and Word (don't believe me? compare Word 2.1 to Word 97!) while Lotus did essentially nothing. Manzi, the CEO, failed twice. He failed to innovate with Lotus, and failed to sell the company - but he ran the company into the ground and made more money failing than I'll make in my entire lifetime when IBM took over the company in a hostile takeover. (Is that a "formula" for success like the Google guys were writing about the other day?)
By the late 90s, the office applications ship had sailed. Lotus rewrote Ami Pro from scratch as Word Pro, and got rid of the one genuinely great product they had going for them. Ami Pro had problems (eg you couldn't flow from the bottom of one page to the top of the next on the screen), but it was a breeze to use, innovative ahead of its time, and Word took a decade to copy all of its features. Word Pro was bloated, slow, and didn't work very well. But by the late 90s, the game was over. IBM does what they do best - buried Lotus SmartSuite in their portfolio of products and milked what little revenue they could from it.
Ami Pro was one of the great gems of the early Windows era. It had easy-to-use style sheets when most people were struggling with "reveal codes" and creating ransome-note documents. Everything about Ami Pro was effortless to me. For whatever reason, Ami Pro always languished behind Word and WordPerfect, but I found it easier to use than any other word processor I've ever encountered.
PS: Hey, remember when Lotus introduced another spreadsheet and competed with itself? It's true. Lotus Improv was the worst software ever created by anyone, up there with Erlang. It was unusable. A few people groked it and liked it, but no one else did. Microsoft's pivot tables in Excel copied the essential novelty in Improv, but made it usable in a real spreadsheet. So Lotus gave Microsoft one of their best Excel features. Sure, MS competed hard and dirty, but their competition made so many missteps.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)