Whenever setting up, maintaining or fixing a business’s IT service offering, it is generally pretty rare to see anything other than Microsoft Windows be used as the main operating system and Office 365 as the main application suite for word processing, spreadsheets and email.
In one sense, this ubiquity is easily explained; most people working in an office-based role know how to use Windows, Word, Excel, Outlook and so on, and if it is working, there is often little incentive to try something new. After all, why fix what isn’t broken in the first place?
However, what is quite interesting is that whilst it is difficult to imagine a business world that does not use the same software tools, this was not always guaranteed to be the case, and as late as the 1990s there was a very real and successful competitor to Microsoft’s dominance.
Few remember Lotus Software today, but in 1983 they were the second largest software company in the world behind Microsoft, who even back then had cornered the business market with MS-DOS.
This was almost entirely thanks to the popularity of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which before the release and popularity of Microsoft Excel was the de facto standard for spreadsheet software.
However, Lotus’ biggest ambition was to create an application suite, and whilst its first two attempts (Symphony and Jazz) were notable failures, the early network collaboration tool Lotus Notes helped keep the company relevant and successful.
Eventually, they created a bundle that would compete with Office in the form of Lotus SmartSuite, consisting of word processor Ami Pro, spreadsheet 1-2-3, presentation software Freelance Graphics, database Approach and digital filofax Organiser.
As SmartSuite was cheaper than Office and was commonly bundled with computers in the 1990s, it became a major competitor to Microsoft’s dominant application suite, but that would not last.
Lotus might have had a chance had they focused on Windows exclusively, but they believed that IBM’s OS/2 Warp operating system would be more lucrative, partly due to a hostile takeover of the company by IBM itself.
This caused more distractions and ultimately meant that Lotus was late to capitalise on the popularity of Windows 95, ultimately being restructured in 2001.