
Lotus sued Paperback Software and Mosaic for copyright infringement, false and misleading advertising, and unfair competition over their low-cost clones of 1-2-3, VP Planner and Twin, and sued Borland over its Quattro spreadsheet. Lotus was involved in a number of lawsuits, of which the most significant were the " look and feel" cases which started in 1987. Improv also flopped, and none of these products made a significant impact on the market. In this period Manuscript, a word processor, Lotus Agenda, an innovative personal information manager (PIM) which flopped, and Improv, a ground-breaking modeling package (and spreadsheet) for the NeXT platform, were released. In the late 1980s Lotus developed Lotus Magellan, a file management and indexing utility. Also in 1985, Lotus bought Software Arts and discontinued its VisiCalc program. Jazz did very poorly in the market (in Guy Kawasaki's book The Macintosh Way, Lotus Jazz was described as being so bad, "even the people who pirated it returned it"). Lotus introduced other office products such as Ray Ozzie's Symphony in 1984 and the Jazz office suite for the Apple Macintosh computer in 1985. DominanceĪs the popularity of the personal computer grew, Lotus quickly came to dominate the spreadsheet market. Manzi remained at the head of Lotus until 1995. In July of that same year he also became Chairman of the Board. In October 1984 he was named president, and in April 1986 he was appointed CEO, succeeding Kapor. In 1982 Jim Manzi - a graduate of Colgate University and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy - came to Lotus as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and became an employee four months later.
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Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year, compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million in sales. In practice the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available. The name referred to the three ways the product could be used, as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager. Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby Visi-Calc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Shortly after Kapor left Visi-Corp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, and selling all his rights to Visi-Plot and Visi-Trend to Visi-Corp. Lotus's first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs with backing from Ben Rosen.
