
Lotus 123 windows 10 Pc#
After kicking off with the FancyZones windows manager and Shortcut Guide, PowerToys now comprises a dozen components, including the near-essential "Awake" utility to keep a PC running without faffing about with power and sleep settings, and Video Conference Mute to kill microphone and/or camera during a conference call regardless of where the focus is. Now at version 0.55, the suite of utilities has swelled since its early days. ®Īlthough the majority of Microsoft's desktop trumpeting is about Windows 11, the company's PowerToys project has quietly become a very handy addition to the user's toolbox.
Lotus 123 windows 10 software#
But this is one of relatively few cases where a software product with essentially no competition simply vaporised. They were occupying the seat that Microsoft decided they wanted to sit it. They stopped innovating, or fiddled while Rome burned, or made stupid decisions. There are plenty of lessons here for software companies. (I know this because I’d occasionally come across a diehard Lotus fan who refused to switch. Years after Excel had unseated it, they still didn’t have a real graphics-based version of 1-2-3. Its triumph over Lotus 1-2-3 is one of a few cases where I’ve felt that a Microsoft product deserved to win, unequivocally. If they decided to crush you, that was that.īut here’s the thing: Unlike the long list of inferior MS products that have captured their markets just because Microsoft willed it, Excel was a truly great piece of software. It’s true that, until just recently, when the competitor that had you in its sights was Microsoft, the virtues of your product usually didn’t matter much. It’s not easy to topple a software product that completely dominates its market (think of how many “better than Google” search engines have disappeared after a week), but it happens. I still don’t know whether one or all of these were the case, but it doesn’t matter now. They were focusing their efforts on an OS/2 version of 1-2-3 they were concentrating on their next-generation “integrated software” package, Symphony - a spectacular flop they were hampered by bureaucracy. Reading up on the company’s history only recently, I saw various explanations for their failure. Wasn’t someone at the company aware that command-line-based programs were going the way of the 300-baud modem? Why Lotus didn’t see this revolution coming a mile away was a mystery to me. A few years later Lotus was basically gone. And, of course, they always wanted the latest toys. Highly paid traders were starting to require more and more sophisticated calculators-ones in which they could, say, cut-and-paste with their mouse. Even if Excel had only 80 per cent of Lotus’s functionality, there’s no way anyone would not be seduced by this product. I watched him work for about a minute, maybe less, and the first thought that came to my mind was: “Lotus is toast.” It was as if I’d been chiseling a message into a rock and someone walked over with a sketch pad and a fancy rollerball pen. I asked him what this program was, and he said it was Excel, a spreadsheet product from Microsoft that was a direct competitor to Lotus. What was happening in that world was still irrelevant.) (Note: At this time Macs were never ever used anywhere on Wall St. If you had to do any calculations more complex than simple addition or multiplication, which everyone did at some point or other, you needed Lotus. I was working in the financial industry at the time, though that hardly mattered because everyone used it. Windows was still just a fancy(-ish) GUI slapped on top of MS-DOS that ran the same old DOS programs, with the exception of a couple of graphics-mode showcase utilities, like a calculator. While most programs were still launched from the command-line, various graphical “operating environments,” including GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), were starting to vie for dominance in that world.
Lotus 123 windows 10 mac#
Real desktop publishing, the kind that had been available to Mac users forever, was only just becoming possible on “IBM-compatible” PCs, via programs like Ventura Publisher. That’s right: WordPerfect was still a serious competitor to Microsoft Word - or, to be more precise, Word was a competitor to WordPerfect.
