Lotus Jazz

Lotus Jazz was an office suite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1985, after the substantial success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM-compatible PC. It was a commercial failure due to both its low quality and also aggressive competition.^{[citation needed]}

Marketing

John Dvorak called it "one of the great flopperoos in computing history" and said "Lotus made every marketing blunder in the book." Among them: overpricing it at $595.00, copy protecting it, and "blunder of blunders, they named it Jazz instead of 1-2-3 for the Mac. This was a dubious decision based on differentiation nonsense."

Lotus started follow-on projects, called "Modern Jazz" and "Mac 1-2-3", neither of which had the Mac "look and feel". Lotus canceled Modern Jazz although it had already been announced. "Seemingly without a clue as to what the Mac was about, and without a successful Mac product to their credit, the Lotus team built in a DOS screen to allow DOS 1-2-3 users to use their familiar keystrokes."^[1]

Innovations

Jazz was not without some interesting features. One of the more notable was the integration of its terminal emulation module with the spreadsheet module, allowing users dialing into corporate mainframes to have onscreen reports be parsed directly into spreadsheet columns for later editing and refinement.

Issues

Jazz shipped on two 3½" diskettes, one to start up and one to operate the program. Most of the speed issues users experienced were related to its poor handling of diskette swaps on Macs which lacked hard drives. However, the aforementioned copy protection precluded copying and running the program entirely from a hard drive if available. A diskette failure also rendered the program unusable.

References

External links

• Lotus Jazz overview