Whatever happened to Lotus?
The Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field are long gone from the scene, while Lotus is still around, in the same corner of east Cambridge that it's always occupied. And last time I checked, nobody was talking about physically moving the operation, lock stock and barrel, anywhere.
They don't need to because the old Lotus is history.
On the eve of its annual user confab in Orlando, Fla., Lotus is about to become officially what a lot of people once feared it would become: just another indistinguishable outpost in the IBM empire.
In a soon-to-be-announced reorganization, the swallowing up will be complete.
Head for the hills
And so the nightmare scenario feared by some when IBM (ibm) launched its hostile takeover of Lotus in June 1995 has finally been realized. After Big Blue paid some $3.5 billion for Lotus, Lou Gerstner and his lieutenants were especially careful to keep a respectful distance. The only difference was that Lotus now had the biggest sugar daddy in the industry on its side.
Jim Manzi didn't hang around long. Neither did a bunch of other mid- and senior-level suits who took their newly vested stock options and bolted.
Still, the Lotus-IBM combination looked pretty good on paper to a lot of people.
In this case, looks were deceiving.
Of course, Microsoft lent a helping hand. But that doesn't change the fact that Lotus has not enjoyed unqualified software success since 1-2-3 was No. 1 on the product charts.
The vast majority of the products Lotus shipped to market have been, at best, mediocre.
What about Lotus Notes, the crown jewels that IBM so coveted? That's a good question. As somebody who used Notes for the last decade--before my department migrated to Microsoft (msft) Outlook--I can swap horror stories about this product until the cows come home.
Failing to exploit the once-significant advantages in collaboration and back-end deployment that Notes enjoyed over all rival products, Lotus and IBM blew a huge opportunity. In the process, Microsoft and other Internet-based alternatives sneaked up and surpassed Notes.
And the less said about Lotus' marvelous ineptitude to sell SmartSuite, the better. One might have assumed IBM could have leveraged its storied muscle--not to mention all those PCs--to turn SmartSuite into a winner. This one is deserving of consideration by the Harvard Business Review.
To be fair, it would be wrong to suggest that the pre-IBM management at Lotus was peopled by a collection of Jack Welch clones. After all, this was the same crew that took forever to get a Win32 version of 1-2-3, a mistake that opened the door for Microsoft Excel.
But at least they had moxie, if not a big dollop of personality. Remember Mitch Kapor doing the Hawaiian-shirt-philosopher thing? How about Manzi telling reporters they were a bunch of hockey pucks for asking particularly dopey questions? And then there was Jeff Papows winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Heisman Trophy and inventing a cure for the common cold in his spare time.
They're all gone now. Would it have made a difference had Lotus remained independent? With Microsoft gunning for Lotus' hide, it would have been a struggle. Then again, at least it would have been fun to watch.