Lotus Development

1-2-3 shipped on 26 January 1983, and the name described three uses - spreadsheet, graphics, database - of which people overwhelmingly used the first. What made it win was less romantic than the name: it was fast, it recalculated quickly, and it was written to exploit machines with 256K of memory rather than the smaller ones its predecessor had targeted.

**The numbers from that first year are worth stating in full.** The business plan forecast $1M of sales. Lotus did **$53M**, and was the world's third largest microcomputer software company by 1983. Very few companies on this timeline missed their own projection by a factor of fifty in the right direction.

**Its predecessor is already on this site.** The Apple entry records VisiCalc as the software that made the Apple II worth buying - the first spreadsheet, and the reason a business would justify a personal computer at all. Kapor came from the company that distributed it and built the product that replaced it. Then in 1985 **Lotus acquired Software Arts, the company that actually wrote VisiCalc, and discontinued it.** The successor bought the predecessor and switched it off.

Jim Manzi arrived in 1982 as a McKinsey consultant, became an employee four months later, president by October 1984, and chief executive in April 1986 when Kapor stepped down. He ran the company until it was sold.

**And then the product that outlived everything else.** Lotus Notes came out of Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, and it was not a spreadsheet, an email client or a database, but a thing built out of all three: replicated document stores that worked when disconnected, with application logic attached. That is an unusual design and it is exactly why it survived - organisations built their actual business processes inside it, and a business process is far harder to migrate than a file format.

**IBM bought Lotus in 1995 for $3.5B**, primarily for Notes, and specifically to get into client-server computing as its own host-based OfficeVision was being made obsolete. Along the way Lotus had also acquired cc:Mail in 1991 - which appears on this timeline in the Qualys entry, because cc:Mail's founder Philippe Courtot went on to run Qualys for two decades.

**On 6 December 2018 IBM announced the sale of Notes and Domino to HCL for $1.8B.** So the software has now had three owners across more than thirty years, and it is still sold, still supported, and still running the internal processes of organisations that built them in the 1990s and never found a reason expensive enough to justify leaving.

That is the fact worth carrying away, and it contradicts how this industry usually talks about itself. **Most of the companies on this timeline were bought for a technology that was quietly retired within a few years. Lotus was bought for one that outlasted the buyer's interest, the buyer's strategy, and eventually the buyer.**

Two footnotes about the founders, both good. Sachs left in 1985 to write photo-editing software and has been shipping it since 1994. Kapor dropped out of a master's degree at MIT Sloan in 1979 to go and start all this, and finished it in 2025 - forty-six years later.