Lotus Approach

~ the last words ~

lotus smartsuite was on every machine in my engineering school computer lab around 2002, but i never opened the approach tab. that part of the obit is honest. lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet you used because the lab pcs had not been upgraded to office xp yet, and word pro was the word processor with the strange page break behavior. approach sat at the bottom of the start menu group with a small key-and-table logo that, in three years of using smartsuite at school, i never once double-clicked. for end-user databases the school used microsoft access, the same as everyone else in 2002.

approach software inc started in 1991 in redwood city california under jaleh bisharat and kevin harvey. the product won comdex best of show in its first year, a rare thing for a database product. the original pitch was a relational database that did not invent yet another file format. you pointed approach at a dbase or paradox file, with foxpro coming in a later release, and it read the data live with no import step. the alternative at the time was buying microsoft access or borland paradox and re-keying or batch-converting all your existing data into the new vendor's binary format.

lotus development acquired approach software in 1993. it became the database component of lotus smartsuite from version 3.0 onward, sold as the relational database tab next to lotus 1-2-3 and lotus word pro. ibm acquired lotus in 1995 for around 3.5 billion dollars in a hostile takeover, mostly for lotus notes, with the smartsuite line continuing as a corporate-bundle product through the late nineties. then microsoft office 95 shipped with access as a standard component in the professional sku. the price of switching to office stopped being a barrier and the corporate market migrated through the rest of the decade.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did well ~

approach's read-native-formats feature was the right idea for the wrong moment. a small business in 1994 with five years of dbase iv invoicing files could install approach and start building forms and reports against that data the same afternoon, no conversion utility, no risk of corruption. it had a reasonably usable form designer and a query system that did not require typing sql. for around a year and a half between the lotus acquisition and the access 95 release approach was the database a windows 3.1 user would reach for if they needed real relational features and could not afford a developer.

the technical thing that put it ahead was the join engine. approach handled inner and outer joins across files in different formats in a single query, which sounds boring now but in 1994 was a feature paradox and access could not match. the form designer ran on top of that join engine, so a single form could pull from a dbase customer file and a paradox order file at the same time. ibm internally used approach for some early notes-database front ends through the late nineties.

~ the long wind-down ~

the last meaningful release was version 9.8 in 2002, shipped inside lotus smartsuite 9.8. fixpacks continued slowly. the final version was 9.8.6.1 on february 5 2009, mostly a windows xp compatibility patch and a small number of bug fixes for the paradox importer. by then ibm was running smartsuite as a legacy product for corporate customers on long-term support contracts, with no new development happening on the codebase. the marketing budget was zero, the product was not visible at any conference past 2005.

in may 2013 ibm announced the withdrawal of smartsuite from sale, effective june 11 2013. all support across the smartsuite line ended on september 30 2014. lotus 1-2-3, lotus organizer, freelance graphics, and approach all died on the same september 2014 calendar entry after thirty years of cumulative product history across the lotus catalog. there was no successor product and no migration tool. ibm pointed customers at libreoffice base or microsoft access depending on which side of the open source line their it department leaned.

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