[jedberg]

No one liked Excel better than Lotus 1-2-3. They picked Excel because it worked best on Windows because it used private APIs and also because they would be sold together.

My dad had quite a lucrative decade as a consultant moving people from Lotus to Excel, and every time he was hired the people hiring him would complain about how they were being forced to move to "crappy Excel" because of the purchasing department.

[scarface74]

If that’s the case, why couldn’t Lotus compete with Microsoft on Macs - even though they tried? Excel was a better product.

Just like people love to wear rose colored glasses and pretend that the only reason that Netscape lost was because MS was unfairly competing, forgetting that NS was so crashed prone that it was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well an operating system could handle a Netscape crash.

[nostrademons]

There are some fairly strong cross-platform network effects between office software, because of file formats. If you had MS Word on the PC and wanted to send documents to a friend who had MS Word on the Mac - well, there were minor issues around disk formats, line terminators, and file transfer protocols, but generally if you had e-mail you could send them a .doc. If you had Lotus 1-2-3 on your Mac and wanted to send files to colleagues with Excel on the PC, you were screwed. (The major software manufacturers did end up reverse-engineering each others' formats by the late 90s, but by then Office had already won.)

If Microsoft had an edge on Windows, which was the majority of computers, then that would translate into inconvenience trying to use any non-MS product on Macs, unless everybody you dealt with used Macs.

[scarface74]

Lotus was slow to move any of their products away from the command line. Excel was on the Mac in 1985. Lotus didn’t come to the Mac until 1991 and when it did, it was awful. Microsoft had years of GUI development experience by the time Windows 3.1 shipped because they were producing Mac software. Lotus and WordPerfect were panned for their early Windows products because they were direct ports more or less of their DOS products, not because they couldn’t get access to super secret Windows APIs.

As far as compatibility. By 1990, Apple/Claris had XTND/Apple File Exchange utilities to convert from Rxcel/Word to ClarisWorks. People knew Microsoft’s formats by then.

The Mac was its own little incompatible island back then with incompatible file formats between Mac Word/Windows Word (though they could be translated), resource forks and data forks, file types as part of the file metadata instead of file extensions, heck even text files used different line endings than either Unix or Windows. Mac users didn’t generally worry about seamless interoperability.

On the other hand, back in the day, Office could open every kind of document under the sun.