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Lotus and IBM

IBM recently announced new releases of Lotus Notes and Domino. A key mystery to me has been why IBM hasn't taken Microsoft on more directly with Lotus products. Perhaps it is just shame from the debacle of their original acquisition of Lotus, and the ass-kicking that they got from MSFT.

Current day users wouldn't know, but not that many years ago Lotus 1 2 3 was the dominant spreadsheet, Harvard Graphics the dominant presentation manager and Word Perfect the leading word processing software.

As soon as the non-competes expired, the Lotus leadership, enriched by IBM, bailed. And the products, other than Lotus Notes, drifted. It would seem to me that it wouldn't be that difficult to update 1 2 3 to be as good or better than Excel, and with Mr. Softie's prices, one would think that their would be plenty of profit to be had and still price below Office.


So, every time I see a big splash announcement from IBM, I think that they've decided to get back in the game. I checked Paul Greenberg's excellent CRM and related blog, where I think he has periodically covered Lotus, but haven't seen anything to indicate that big blue is doing anything other than working on Domino servers and some moderate updates of Lotus....

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