Word: lotuses
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...touch of paranoia is not a bad thing to bring to the computer-software business, where shifting alliances, rapid technological changes and intricate co-dependencies make plotting long-term strategies hazardous. For example, Software Arts, which invented the electronic spreadsheet, lost its market to Lotus because it failed to anticipate the impact of the IBM PC. Lotus, in turn, failed to recognize the importance of Windows and the Mac, and was overtaken by Microsoft...
Using a strategy Arthur calls "target, leverage, link and lock," Microsoft proceeded to convert dos users to Windows users, Windows users to Word users and so on down the product line. Microsoft's customers, of course, were free to switch to WordPerfect for Windows or Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows or any other competing products. But by the time those programs were ready, Microsoft already owned the markets. "You could argue," says Arthur, "that Microsoft is the product of clever strategy, mediocre technology and a hell of a lot of increasing returns...
...Microsoft Home division, for example, is an attempt to leverage its position in the market for business desktops, which is becoming saturated, and move into the so-called SOHO (small office, home office) market, which is growing at an estimated 20% a year. Microsoft has begun advancing on Lotus by adding Notes-like groupware features to Windows 95 and Windows NT. And pursuing what may be its most important source of revenue in the next few years, Microsoft continues to work relentlessly on Novell's and Oracle's biggest customers, arguing that it would simplify their lives to have Microsoft...
...Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst," says Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and a longtime Gates watcher. According to G. Pascal Zachary, author of Showstopper! (Free Press; $22.95), a book about the making of Windows NT, the company is the model of a new, postmodern corporate culture, perfectly suited to survive in an era of rapid technological change. The Microsoft way, says Zachary, writing in Upside magazine, is neither purely individualistic (the American approach) nor consensus driven (the Japanese style) but a third way he calls "armed truce," in which employees are encouraged to challenge everybody, even...
...togain back lost ground in the high-tech world, IBM announced a $3.3 billion hostile takeover bid for Lotus Development Corp., maker of the popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and other software. "Together, our skills match in a way that is breathtaking," IBM's chairman and CEO Louis Gerstner told a news conference. (Lotus, the third-largest PC software company after Microsoft and Novell, rejected IBM's buyout suggestions during five months of private talks, but today said it would consider the $60 per share cash offer, which amounts to twice its market value.)TIME senior technology editor Philip...