Lotus Freelance Graphics

» see lotus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Fifty kilobytes. That was a typical Freelance Graphics presentation, which meant twenty or more of them fit on one 1.44 megabyte floppy, and the person carrying that disk was carrying everything they had presented that year. Nobody thinks about file size now. In 1993 it decided whether you could take your work home.

Lotus did not write it. Graphic Communications Inc did, and Lotus acquired the company in 1986 to get a presentation product to sit beside 1-2-3, which was at that point the most important piece of software in the world. Freelance ran on DOS first, then on OS/2, and Freelance Graphics for Windows 1.0 arrived in October 1991 into a market Harvard Graphics had owned for most of the previous decade.

It won that fight. Harvard Graphics had roughly seventy percent of the presentation market in the late eighties and could not make the jump to Windows cleanly, and Freelance took the ground while it stumbled. What Freelance then discovered is that beating the incumbent does not matter much if a bigger company is about to give your category away as part of a bundle.

This one sits outside my range. It was an office product with an office audience, and its good years ran from the late eighties to the mid nineties, when I was a child in Ankara who would not touch a networked machine until 1998. By the time presentation software was something I had any use for, the only name for it was PowerPoint, and the fact that a serious alternative had ever existed was not information anyone was passing down.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

Two decisions killed Lotus's whole suite and Freelance went down inside them. The first was betting on OS/2, which IBM was certain would be the next operating system and which the market declined to install. Effort spent on the OS/2 versions was effort not spent on Windows, at exactly the wrong moment.

The second was the Windows 95 delay. Microsoft used a licensing dispute to keep Lotus away from the Windows 95 codebase, which meant Office shipped roughly six months ahead of SmartSuite on the platform everyone was about to buy. Six months in 1995 was the whole race. By the time SmartSuite arrived, corporate buyers had already standardized on the other thing, and every year after that made switching more expensive.

~ the day it died ~

The last version that meant anything was 9.8, with its final fixpack in 2002, and after that IBM simply kept it on the price list without doing much to it. The formal end came in an IBM announcement letter: withdrawal from marketing on 11 June 2013, then end of all support on 30 September 2014. IBM stated plainly that there would be no replacement product.

A twenty eight year old application went out with a document number and a date, which is the correct ending for enterprise software and a strange one for something that used to be a fight. What survives is the fifty kilobyte file, still sitting on floppies in boxes in a lot of offices, in a format nothing currently installed can open.

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