Lotus SmartSuite

» see ibm.com/software/lotus/smartsuite as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i never installed smartsuite. my office software through the late 1990s was microsoft works, which came preinstalled on the family pc, then microsoft office 97 when i needed something a teacher would accept. by the time i was using a computer for university work in 2003, office xp had already settled in as the default. lotus 1-2-3 was a name on the inside of some box i had seen at a shop. that is the position the smartsuite bundle held in turkey by then: respected on paper, not actually chosen.

lotus smartsuite was lotus's late-1992 attempt to do what microsoft office and wordperfect office were already doing, which is to stop selling 1-2-3 and ami pro as separate boxes and ship them together with shared menus at a single price. the bundle had 1-2-3 for the spreadsheet and wordpro (formerly ami pro) for word processing. on top of those two it shipped freelance graphics for presentations and approach for desktop databases. lotus organizer and a smaller utility called smartcenter rounded out the package. ibm bought lotus in 1995 for $3.2 billion. smartsuite came along with notes, which was the real prize. lotus was a notes company that also happened to own an office suite, and that ordering of priorities ended up shaping the next twenty years of the product's slow decline.

the last actual update was smartsuite millennium edition 9.8 in october 2002. after that, ibm shipped only fixpacks. extended support was announced as ending in 2013 and full withdrawal closed on september 30 2014. no replacement was offered. that was the official end of the lotus office-suite brand, twenty-two years after the first bundle.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

smartsuite had real strengths if you looked past the brand. approach was a desktop database that hid sql behind a query-by-example interface, easier to teach a non-technical office worker than access. freelance graphics had decent templates and a slide-sorter that beat early powerpoint on layout, while lotus organizer rendered itself as a paper-style binder with literal tabs and page-flip animations that became one of the more loved skeuomorphic interfaces of the 1990s. 1-2-3 itself still had a loyal accounting base from the dos era who knew the slash-key menu by heart.

none of that was the problem. the problem was that ibm priced smartsuite as if it were competitive, then under-funded its marketing and let it slip behind office on file-format compatibility. by 1997 the average office worker received word documents and excel sheets in email. smartsuite could read them, mostly, but the round-trip lost formatting. for a corporate buyer that was enough to switch.

~ the long decline ~

ibm spent the late 1990s and early 2000s trying every angle to keep smartsuite alive. smartsuite got bundled free with thinkpads. it shipped on os/2 long after os/2 had stopped being viable as a desktop. ibm gave it away to schools and to large enterprise accounts that already had notes licenses. none of it moved the share line. by 2002 the consumer suite was effectively in maintenance mode. the october 2002 9.8 release was the last with new features, and the years after that saw only patches for new windows versions.

when ibm finally announced withdrawal in may 2013, the cited reason was the obvious one. nobody was actively buying smartsuite anymore. the still-installed base was small enough that ibm could close support and not generate a meaningful customer-revolt response. on september 30 2014, the same day 1-2-3 and lotus organizer also lost support, smartsuite was formally out of the catalog.

~ what got buried ~

the part worth remembering is that smartsuite was technically fine. that is the lesson of office-suite history, and it gets repeated with every challenger. being a good piece of software is not the same as being the default. office won because it was already on every pc that arrived in an office, and the cost of teaching a hundred people to use anything else was higher than the cost of switching the few hold-outs to office. smartsuite ended because that math never tipped back.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »