[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.