Why Was The First Highly Marketed Office Suite A Failure?
The office suite is often the central choice an IT support team will provide to ensure that a business sector has the solution to suit their needs.
In most cases, this would be Microsoft Office, also known as 365. It is the most common office suite, with the most common applications required for most business purposes outside of bespoke sector needs.
However, it was not always the common choice for businesses, nor was it even the first application suites.
In fact, Microsoft’s arch-rival in the field, Lotus, sold a very notable all-in-one office suite intended to stop businesses from shopping between their own Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar and dBASE to create a makeshift suite of programmes.
Unfortunately, the resulting Lotus Jazz turned out to be one of the most notable failures in the history of productivity software.
Cacophony
At one point, Lotus was the king of the spreadsheets and it is extremely difficult to quantify the effect Lotus 1-2-3 had on the office world as we know it today.
It was part of the business canon in the 1980s, and that only changed when office suites such as Microsoft Office made it more convenient and cheaper to buy a single application suite that would be upgraded at the same time.
Lotus understood that this was the way the business world was going, and developed Lotus Jazz with that in mind.
It was an integrated suite of not only a spreadsheet but also a word processor, a database, a graphics suite and communications software that all talked into each other in the same way Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Teams do today.
In many respects, Lotus Jazz was ahead of its time and was designed specifically to take advantage of both the capabilities and weaknesses of the Apple MacIntosh, using four single-density floppy disks within a rather substantial box to cover the entire application set.
Rather unusually for the time, Lotus spent a lot of money on an extensive advertising campaign, using smooth jazz (appropriately) to emphasise how easy it was to use and how integrated the application suite was.
It went as far as to describe itself as the software suite that Apple’s famous MacIntosh was invented for, although this turned out to be a laughable claim once it was finally released.
Lotus Jazz ultimately sold a mere 20,000 copies of Jazz whilst Microsoft Excel sold ten times that for Excel for MacIntosh alone.
What went wrong? It turned out to be a wide variety of issues, caused in no small part due to an underestimation of the system they were designed for.
There was no support for a hard drive option, so users had to not only keep hold of four floppy disks but ensure that they worked at all times, otherwise significant fundamental parts of the entire suite would just break immediately.
Despite this, it also required a lot more resources than were typically available from a computer of the era, with one infamous Macworld interview claiming that it was designed for a computer with at least twice if not four times the memory capabilities of a typical Mac of the era.
The best reviews said that it could be fixed, but also noted that not a lot of the package was truly correct given the price tag of $600 (£476) that the software suite cost at the time, far more than the £217.20 per user per year the biggest Microsoft 365 deal cost.
As well as this, Lotus used a copy protection scheme that was actually too effective, which limited the ability for businesses to create the backup disks they typically needed, which was an unusual flaw for a piece of software to have at the time but regardless put some business users off.
Also, Jazz was not a well-known name amongst business users, given that Lotus 1-2-3 was still being sold as a standalone piece of software, and implied that Jazz was a piece of standalone software that it evidently was not.
It was also appallingly advertised, not focusing their marketing approach on the Apple users they were looking for.
They did plan to fix this with an updated version known as Modern Jazz but ultimately a change in upper management at Lotus changed the focus to Lotus 1-2-3 and later the Lotus SmartSuite package that had a much greater chance of succeeding compared to the integrated suite.
Lotus Jazz was not without its value, but most of its benefits were in small aspects of the software and were not worth the total value of the software.
