> Lotus was a big, cash rich company at the time. Their fatal error was not realizing they should have ported 1-2-3 to both OS/2 and Windows. Then they would have been secure regardless of which prevailed
That’s...optimistic. The transition to GUIs undermined a major hold they had, which was user-familiarity-lock-in. That transition was going to be an opening no matter what, especially for a competitor that also controlled the platform that won out underneath the application.
Lotus bet the farm on OS/2. Not being on Windows made it an easy decision for customers to buy Excel.
Lotus was bigger than Microsoft for most (all?) of the 1980s.
Wordstar was another company that failed to understand the shift to GUIs.
Of course, Wordstar had another major marketing problem. Despite its dominance, nobody knew the name of the company (MicroPro) that made it. Far too late they realized the mistake and changed the company name to Wordstar. Microsoft never made that mistake.
That’s...optimistic. The transition to GUIs undermined a major hold they had, which was user-familiarity-lock-in. That transition was going to be an opening no matter what, especially for a competitor that also controlled the platform that won out underneath the application.