Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study 6

Mitchell Kapor

(Co founder Lotus Development)

Lotus development was founded by Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs in 1982. Lotus 1-2-3 quickly surpassed visicalc to became the new industry standard. It is spreadsheet software. Kapor was a Visicalc product manager at personal software when he wrote the Visiplot and Visitrend. It is one of the companion productes of Visicalc. Lotus 1-2-3 could handle larger spreadsheet and added integrated charting, plotting and database. For personal computers Visicalc was origiunally the “killer app” but when Lotus 1-2-3 came, it became the “killer app killer”. Kapor served as the president and CEO of Lotus Development and it went to public in 1983. Kapor also founded the Electoniuc Frontier Foundation (EFF) and now leads the open source applications foundation.

Kapor has become obsessed with a personal computer, that’s why he bought the Apple II in the summer of 1978. Kapor really don’t know what to do in that PC so he quickly started to generate some consulting income, and writing programs for individuals who wants to bought them for practice use and for looking a stock data. In those days Apple II was a hobby phenomenon so several people that started to use an Apple II have a group called “New England Apple Tree”. And one of these people was Eric Rosenfeld, a finance student of MIT. he ask a favor to KApor if he could write a statistics routine that can help him to analyze data in his dissertion. Afterwards they realize that it might be useful to other people so they built a statistics and graphics product on the Apple II called “Tiny Troll” or simply “Troll”. The most useful piece of software was done in Apple II wherein at the same time Bricklin and Fanrkson also developing Visicalc. The authors of Visicalc were Software Arts and the publishers were Personal Computers, which change their name to Visicorp.

They introduce their publishers to Kapor and Offering him that Tiny Troll will be a companion product of Visicalc and Kapor agreed. After a that he had a difficulty in totally rewriting Tiny Troll so he decided to come out of California and requested to hire him as the Product Manager and said that the software is “almost done” Tiny Troll change its name to Visiplot. They had a problem in using Visicalc and Visiplot at the same time so they decided to store it at the same floppy disk. Building a program took Kapor in a point where he wants to quit and stop building it. 

The three things I’ve learned are first, most of the startup people have their friends who are willing to do business with them. Second, that it is not only about the technology you are in but also in business. How can you go out on the market if you really don’t know hot to run a company? Third is, in doing things or stuff you want, you should be personally passionated, committed, and believed in what you’re doing. Not just you only want to do it but also because also you want something to prove.